15.2. Designing Your Auto Attendant

The most common mistake beginners make when designing an AA is needless complexity. While there can be much joy and sense of accomplishment in the creation of a multilevel AA with dozens of nifty options and oodles of really cool prompts, your callers have a different agenda. The reason people make phone calls is primarily because they want to talk to someone. While people have become used to the reality of auto attendants, and in some cases they can speed things up, for the most part people would prefer to speak to somebody live. This means that there are two fundamental rules that every auto attendant should adhere to:

Before you start to code your AA, it is wise to design it. You will need to define a call flow, and you will need to specify the prompts that will play at each step. Software diagramming tools can be useful for this, but there’s no need to get fancy. Table 15-1 provides a good template for a basic auto attendant that will do what you need.