Press #3 to finally speak to a human being...

I think there should be a head count requirement before companies are allowed to use nasty automated receptionist phone systems.

I had the hilarious experience of phoning a company and being greeted by a spiritless pre-recorded message droning about who I was phoning. It really was one of those comedy voices that sounded like it was pasted together from snippets of other recordings, like some kind of vocal ransom note.

This was a phone number that was printed on the top of their website as a primary contact number, to get through to their sales department took 45 seconds. That included listening to the drone say "You have selected sales. We are now connecting you to a member of our sales team." I'd totally forgotten what I was going to buy by the time I got there.

If you don't have a full time receptionist, just have your sales team answer the phones. Established customers should have direct lines to the support team or their account manager and new customers almost certainly want to talk to sales anyways.

Equip your staff with a standard, short greeting that tells the caller who they're speaking to (and try to resist saying it so fast that they can't actually hear). Give everybody a little card to stick to the phone or their monitor with quick instructions for transferring calls and key extension numbers. It's also useful if people actually know what their colleagues do so that callers can be put through to the relevant member of staff.

Of course, if the company that I'd been trying to contact had replied to emails then I wouldn't have had to phone them at all, but that's the subject of another post ;0)