Auto attendant script examples and IVR samples

An auto attendant script is the exact wording your phone menu speaks to callers: a short greeting, a list of options tied to keypad digits, and a fallback that reaches a human. A good one runs 15 to 25 seconds, names the company in the first three words, offers no more than five options, and puts the most-requested department first. The scripts below are written to be copied, edited, and recorded as they stand.

Most phone menus are bad for the same two reasons. Somebody wrote the greeting once, in a hurry, on the day the system was installed, and nobody has read it aloud since. And the options are listed in the order the org chart happens to sit in rather than the order callers actually ask for them. Both are fixable in about twenty minutes with a script.

The five scripts every business needs

A phone menu is not one recording. It is a small set of them, and the ones after the first are the ones businesses forget until a caller hits silence on a Saturday.

If you only build one extra recording beyond the main greeting, make it the after-hours one. It handles every call that arrives in the roughly two thirds of the week when your office is shut.

Auto attendant script examples for the main greeting

This is the recording that plays on every call during business hours. The pattern that works is: company name, a one-line orientation, then the options, then the escape route.

General small business

"Thank you for calling Brightline Plumbing. For scheduling and new appointments, press 1. For an existing job or a technician on site, press 2. For billing, press 3. To speak with someone directly, press 0, or stay on the line and we will connect you."

That runs about 18 seconds read at a normal pace. Note what it does not do. It does not say "your call is important to us," it does not read the website address, and it does not thank the caller twice. Every second before the first option is a second the caller spends waiting to hear the thing they came for.

Professional services firm

"Thank you for calling Hartwell and Associates. If you know your party's extension, you may dial it at any time. For new client inquiries, press 1. For an existing matter, press 2. For accounts and billing, press 3. For our office address and hours, press 4. To reach the front desk, press 0."

Medical or dental office

Practices need one extra line at the top, and it is the only case where something should come before the company name.

"If this is a medical emergency, please hang up and dial 911. Thank you for calling Cedar Park Family Dental. To schedule, change, or cancel an appointment, press 1. For prescription refills, press 2. For billing and insurance, press 3. For all other questions, press 0 to reach our front desk."

Two notes on this one. The emergency line goes first because a caller in trouble should not have to listen to a menu to learn they are in the wrong place. And if your practice handles protected health information, the phone system itself is in scope for HIPAA, so confirm your provider will sign a business associate agreement before you record anything. Not every provider will, and it is a question worth asking early rather than late.

Retail or restaurant

"Thanks for calling Ninth Street Kitchen. For today's hours and location, press 1. For takeout and catering orders, press 2. To reach the host stand, press 0. You can also order online at our website."

How long should an auto attendant greeting be?

Aim for 15 to 25 seconds for a main greeting, which is roughly 45 to 70 words at a natural speaking pace. Anything past 30 seconds and callers start pressing digits before the menu finishes, which sends them to the wrong department and generates the transfers you built the menu to avoid. Read your draft out loud with a timer before you record it. Scripts that look short on a screen are routinely twice as long spoken.

How many options should an auto attendant have?

Five or fewer at the top level. Callers hold menu options in working memory while they listen, and past about five the early ones start dropping out, which is why people press 0 or hang up. If you genuinely need more destinations, nest them one level deep rather than extending the first list: press 2 for billing, then a short sub-menu for payments and invoices. Keep the nesting to a single level. A menu that goes three deep is a menu people escape from.

After hours auto attendant script

The failure mode here is a recording that says the office is closed without saying when it opens. A caller who hears "our offices are currently closed" still has to guess whether to try again tonight or Monday.

"Thank you for calling Brightline Plumbing. Our office is closed right now. We are open Monday through Friday, 8am to 6pm Central. If you have a plumbing emergency, press 1 to reach our on-call technician. Otherwise, leave your name, number, and a short description after the tone, and we will call you back the next business morning."

The emergency branch matters more than it looks. Plenty of businesses route every after-hours call to voicemail and lose the one caller in twenty who had an urgent, high-value problem. Sending that caller to a real phone with an on-call rule is usually the highest-return thing a small business does with its phone system, and it is what call routing and ring groups exist to handle. If you want a longer treatment of the voicemail wording specifically, we wrote a full set of after-hours voicemail scripts separately.

Holiday auto attendant script

"Thank you for calling Hartwell and Associates. Our office is closed for the Thanksgiving holiday and will reopen on Monday, December 1st at 9am Eastern. If your matter is urgent, press 1 and your call will be forwarded. Otherwise please leave a message and we will return it when we reopen."

Set the dates in advance rather than on the morning of. Every system worth using lets you schedule a holiday rule months ahead, and the recordings you make in November while calm are better than the one you record at 7am on the day.

IVR script examples for department menus

These are the short recordings that play after somebody presses a digit. Their job is to confirm the caller chose correctly and to set an expectation, in under twelve seconds.

Only promise a wait time you actually meet. "Under three minutes" that turns out to be nine does more damage than saying nothing, because the caller now has a specific broken promise to be annoyed about.

What to leave out of an auto attendant script

• "Your call is very important to us." It communicates nothing and costs two seconds on every single call. At 200 calls a week that is over an hour a year of dead air.
• Your full mailing address and website. Put it behind an option for the small number of callers who want it. Do not read it to everyone.
• "Please listen carefully as our menu options have changed." They changed once, four years ago. Remove it.
• Music or effects under the greeting. It reduces intelligibility on a mobile connection, which is how most of your callers are calling.
• A menu with no zero. Always give a route to a person. Callers who cannot find one hang up and call a competitor.

Recording the script once you have written it

Read it aloud three or four times before recording, standing up, at a pace that feels slightly too slow. Record in a small room with soft furnishings rather than a conference room, which echoes. Most systems accept an uploaded WAV or MP3, so you can record on a phone in a parked car and get a cleaner result than a laptop microphone in an open office.

Use one voice for every recording in the set. A main greeting in one person's voice and an after-hours message in another sounds like two different companies to the caller who hears both in the same week. If you are hiring a voice artist, send them the whole set at once and the pronunciation of anything unusual in your company name.

An auto attendant routes, it does not answer questions

Worth being clear about the boundary, because it decides whether a script is the right fix at all. An auto attendant plays a recording and reacts to keypresses. It cannot understand a spoken question, take a booking, or hold a conversation. If what you actually want is something that talks to callers, answers what they asked, and books the appointment itself, that is a different category of product: an AI receptionist that answers calls and books appointments rather than a menu. Buy on that basis and judge it on how it handles the questions your callers really ask, not on menu design.

For most small businesses the menu is still the right tool, because the majority of calls are a routing problem rather than a conversation problem. Someone wants scheduling, or billing, or the person they spoke to last week. A well-ordered five-option menu solves that in nine seconds.

Where the phone menu sits on your plan

One practical note before you write anything, because it catches people out. The auto attendant is usually not on the cheapest tier. Across the main US providers the phone menu tends to sit one plan above entry, so the price quoted in most comparison articles is not the price that gets you a menu at all. There are exceptions worth knowing: Nextiva includes an auto attendant on its $15 Core plan, Phone.com includes IVR on its $15 Basic plan, and Ooma includes a virtual receptionist on Essentials at $19.95. On Phoner the visual builder is a Team feature at $29 per user. Check which tier carries it before you budget, on whichever provider you are considering.

If you want the underlying concepts rather than the copy, we cover what an auto attendant is and how it differs from a live receptionist, and the IVR phone menu builder shows how these scripts get assembled into working call flows with business hours and holiday rules attached.

Common questions about auto attendant scripts

What is an auto attendant script?

An auto attendant script is the written wording a phone menu speaks to callers, covering the greeting, the numbered options, and the fallback to a person. It is written before recording so the phrasing, order, and length are deliberate rather than improvised. A complete set usually includes a main greeting, an after-hours version, a holiday version, and short prompts for each department.

What should an auto attendant say first?

The company name, within the first three words. Callers use it to confirm they dialed correctly, and until they hear it they are not really listening to anything else. The one exception is a medical or dental practice, where an emergency instruction to hang up and dial 911 belongs ahead of the name.

Should you offer a zero option to reach a person?

Yes, on every menu, and say it out loud rather than leaving it undocumented. A caller with a question your menu does not cover has exactly two choices: find a human or hang up. Systems that hide the zero option generate more abandoned calls and more repeat dials, and the caller who eventually reaches you is already irritated.

Can you use the same script for after hours?

No. The daytime greeting offers options that lead to people who are not there, so a caller who presses 2 at 9pm hears ringing and nothing else. The after-hours recording needs its own wording: the fact that you are closed, when you reopen, an emergency route if you have one, and a voicemail prompt.

How do you write an IVR script for a small team?

Start from the last fifty calls rather than the org chart. Write down what each caller actually wanted, group those into three or four buckets, and order the buckets by how often they came up. Small teams usually find two options cover most calls, which means a short menu and a zero for everything else beats a five-option menu built around departments that only exist on paper.

Do auto attendant scripts need a legal disclaimer?

Only if you are recording calls. Recording brings consent obligations that vary by state, and whether you must announce it depends on whether the state uses one-party or all-party consent, so a business with customers in several states usually announces on every call as the simpler policy. The announcement belongs on the recorded leg of the call rather than in the main menu greeting.