Using Multiple Greetings for Automated Attendants

The Automated Attendant feature can be quite flexible when used with the Multiple Personal Greetings feature. Since the voiced menu is the personal greeting for the automated attendant's extension, administering personal greetings for an automated attendant is the same as for any subscriber.

The Multiple Personal Greetings feature allows you to specify as many as 9 unique personal greetings for the extension, and to specify circumstances for using different greetings, such as for internal and external calls, busy and no-answer calls, and out-of-hours calls. Use the System Parameters Features screen to define the out-of-hours period. Calls made outside of prime time as defined on that screen are considered to be out-of-hours.

If an out-of-hours greeting is selected, it overrides internal/external and busy/no-answer identification for all calls received during the period designated out-of-hours. Note that multiple greetings can be set up for either internal/ external or busy/no-answer, but not for both at the same time. Internal/external and out-of-hours make sense for most automated attendants.

When used for an automated attendant, multiple personal greetings allow you to provide not only different greetings, but to voice different options for selected types of callers. Even though the voiced greetings are different for different types of callers, the available menu options remain the same for each call.

For example, you can define the following greetings for the automated attendant:

1. For all external calls, the greeting is:

   • "Thank you for calling Smith and Jones."

   • "To transfer to a specific extension, enter that extension now."

   • "To reach the sales department, press 1."

   • "To reach the accounting department, press 2."

   • "To reach the personnel department, press 3."

   • "To get further assistance, press 0 or wait."

   • Note

     You may want to have a main automated attendant that has a greeting similar to, "Thank you for calling Smith and Jones. If you have a touchtone telephone, press 1. If you are calling from a rotary telephone, please wait and an attendant will be with you shortly."

2. For all internal calls, the greeting is:

   • "To reach a specific person, enter the extension."

   • "To reach Sales, press 1."

   • "For Accounting, press 2."

   • "For Personnel, press 3."

   • "For Security, press 8."

   • "To access employee bulletin board information, press 9."

3. For all out-of-hours callers, the greeting is:

   • "Thank you for calling Smith and Jones."

   • "Our normal office hours are 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday."

   • "To leave a message for a specific person, enter the mailbox number using the keys on your touchtone telephone."

   • "If this is an emergency, please press 8."

The example above allows the automated attendant to voice specific information for different types of callers and to exclude or include options depending on caller type.

Note

All options listed on the Subscriber screen are available to all callers; they are just not mentioned as options in the greeting.