Auto‑attendant & routing
Every call has somewhere to go
“Press 1 for sales” is the easy part. The hard part is the call at 4:58 pm on Christmas Eve when the person who handles that option left in 2023, and what your phone system does with it.
Menus
Answer, offer options, route
Build a menu that greets callers and sends them where they asked to go. Record the prompt from a handset or upload audio you have already had produced.
- Any key to any destination — a person, a department, another menu, a mailbox, or an outside number
- Nested menus, for when one level is genuinely not enough
- A defined fallback for a caller who presses nothing, presses something that is not an option, or is on a phone whose keypad tones do not come through
- A way straight to a human, which we will encourage you to keep. The fastest way to lose a caller is a menu with no exit.
Hours and holidays
Business hours, after hours, lunch, and a holiday calendar. The same number behaves differently at 10 am on a Tuesday and 8 pm on a Sunday, without anybody remembering to switch it.
- Different greetings for open, closed and holiday
- Per‑department schedules — support until 6, accounts until 4
- A holiday list set once a year rather than remembered each time
- Override it manually when you close early for the snow
Groups
Getting a call to whoever is free
Ring everyone
Every phone in the group rings at once and the first to answer takes it. Good for a small team that sits together.
Ring in order
Try the first person, then the second, then the third. Good when there is a clear order of who should take a call.
Share it round
Start with whoever has been waiting longest, so one person does not absorb every call because their phone is listed first.
Then somewhere definite
When nobody answers, the call goes to a destination you chose — a mailbox, another group, or a cell phone. Never to a phone ringing in an empty room.
Design principle
No call falls off the end
The commonest fault we find when taking over a phone system is a route with no ending. A group whose members have all left. A menu option pointing at a deleted extension. An after‑hours path nobody built. The caller hears ringing until they give up, and the business never finds out.
Corinne makes you name a destination for the unanswered case, and warns you when you delete something another route still points at — rather than quietly breaking it.
A worked example
A typical arrangement for a ten-person business.
| Main number, open hours | Greeting, then a menu |
|---|---|
| Press 1 | Sales group — rings 3 phones, 20 seconds |
| Press 2 | Support group — in order, 30 seconds |
| Press 0 | Reception |
| No key pressed | Reception |
| Nobody answers | The relevant department’s mailbox |
| Closed / holiday | Closed greeting, then main mailbox |
| Direct‑dial numbers | Straight to that person, bypassing the menu |
We build this with you during setup, then hand you the portal so you can change it yourself.
Common questions
Can we change the greeting ourselves?
What if a caller's keypresses do not come through?
Can different numbers ring differently?
How solid is this part?
Bring us your current call flow
Even if it is a diagram on a whiteboard. We will rebuild it and show you what it looks like.