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Automated Attendant (AA) is essentially a digital answering facility that answers incoming calls giving the caller a choice of options to direct their call to the required department.
‘’Press 1 for Sales; 2 for Accounts; 3 for Deliveries or 0 for Reception’’
This facility allows you to route the caller to their required department thus easing the strain on individual staff members who would normally filter all calls to any given department.
You should put great effort into planning the implementation of an Automated Attendant system. Consider designing this using a flow chart mapping the options given to callers and their call redirection.
Keep things simple, only give callers up to 4 choices at a time otherwise by the time it says "press 6 for Returns Dept" they will have forgotten what function option 1 performs.
Always offer an escape route such as "press 0 for Reception at any time".
Arriving at an AA menu that does not have any options the caller requires and does not have an escape route will only infuriate your customers very quickly.
Most Voice Processing systems (Voice Mail) include AA features but if not AA can be purchased as a separate system if Voice Processing/Voice Mail is not required.
