System information

a whole new menu. For example, for a few weeks each year you might want your
greeting to say “Season’s greetings” or whatever, but your menu will not need to change.
Also, if you want to play a different recording after hours (“Thank you for calling. Our
office is now closed.”), you can use different greetings, but the heart of the menu can
stay the same. Finally, if you want to be able to return callers to the menu from a
different part of the system, you will normally not want them to hear the greeting again.
The Main Menu
The main menu prompt is where you inform your callers of the choices available to
them. You should speak this as quickly as possible (without sounding rushed).
†
When
you record a choice, always tell the users the action that will be taken before giving them
the digit option to take that action. So, don’t say “press 1 for sales,” but rather say “for
sales, press 1.” The reason for this is that most people will not pay full attention to the
prompt until they hear the choice that is of interest to them. Once they hear their choice,
you will have their full attention and can tell them what button to press to get them to
where they want to go.
Another point to consider is what order to put the choices in. A typical business, for
example, will want sales to be the first menu choice, and most callers will expect this
as well. The important thing is to think of your callers. For example, most people will
not be interested in address and fax information, so don’t make that the first choice.
‡
Think about the goal of getting the callers to their intended destinations as quickly as
possible when you make your design choices. Ruthlessly cut anything that is not ab-
solutely essential.
Selection 1
Option 1 in our example will be a simple transfer. Normally this would be to a resource
located in another context, and it would typically have an internal extension number
so that internal users could also transfer calls to it. In this example, we are going to use
this option to send callers to the queue called sales that was created in Chapter 13.
Selection 2
Option 2 will be technically identical to option 1. Only the destination will be different.
This selection will transfer callers to the support queue.
† If necessary, you can use an audio editing program such as Audacity to remove silence, and even to speed up
the recording a bit.
‡ In fact, we don’t normally recommend this in an AA because it adds to what the caller has to listen to, and
most people will go to a website for this sort of information.
334 | Chapter 15: The Automated Attendant