Give your caller options immediately when they call to reach the person or department they want or get the information about your business they need.

Employing an auto attendant in your office is a solid strategy in terms of growth for your company or practice. As business starts moving faster and faster, using an auto attendant can allow you to catch every call, every time.

She told me that she had a few objections to the auto attendant. A couple of people said they "always like to reach a person" and she said "that's the beauty of this, that they do." One button reaches her office. One button reaches her claims service.

The menu for your office auto attendant phone tree these five basic operational features included to make it easy for your callers to navigate and reach the person or department they need.

When a business owner calls and wants to talk about a Virtual Receptionist for his business we help him decide what is best for his business, an Auto Attendant, a Backup Attendant or just voice mail. They work in different ways and solve different problems for each business.

"Please hang up and call your pharmacy. They will contact us on your behalf if necessary..." This single phrase was the response to 70 percent of the calls to a local medical office I setup this past week. The physician in the office told me her lines (and her staff) were to busy answering the phone and repeating that phrase to take care of patients in the office.

I had a referral from an associate to a doctor who needed a "phone tree". He needed to have a caller make a selection to reach different people in his offices. The phone tree he described started with the basics:

Routing for IT support calls can be hard to manage. Internal phone systems can direct calls to an extension when someone makes a selection. And it may be able to ring several phones at once so all of the support staff can take turns with calls. But after hours are a different issue. Routing calls to a single phone after hours may not be a good option. Rotating calls to the support staff cell phones is the solution.

We just finished a Virtual Receptionist system for a real estate team of three women that are specialists in short sales. They needed one central phone number to advertise on their brochures, website, cards and property signs. The number had to give caller the options to reach each of them and rings their cell phone or get information about their business (office location, website, fax number etc.).

We have a new client whose phone service provider is Suddenlink. She needed calls to be answered if her line was busy or she did not answer after 4 rings. In order for our Virtual Receptionist to go live the client had to add change the Basic Call Forwarding to No Answer Call Forward with Suddenlink.