Building an auto-attendant callers do not hang up on

An interactive voice response menu (an IVR, or auto-attendant) greets the caller and points them somewhere. Built well, it runs a few seconds and offers three choices. Built badly, it becomes the wall your customers hang up at.

Search the topic in French and everything you find is written for France. The mechanics are similar; the legal frame is not.

The rule of three

A caller holds about three options in mind. Past that they stop listening and press zero, or hang up.

That constraint is useful: if your menu has seven choices, the question is not how to say them faster but which ones genuinely belong at the first level. Three doors that lead somewhere beat seven that lead to a second menu.

A second level is not forbidden. It is just rarely necessary, and never worth a third.

Name the destination, not the department

"Press 2 for customer service" assumes the caller knows how you are organised. They do not.

"Press 2 for a bill or a payment" describes their problem instead. It is the same routing, and the caller gets it right the first time.

What the number should follow

Say the action before the key: "for a bill, press 2." The reverse ("press 2 for a bill") makes someone hold a digit before they know what it is for, so they listen to the whole menu again.

What the Charter adds in Quebec

This is the part no French page will tell you, because it does not apply to them.

If you serve the public in Quebec, the greeting is in French. An option in another language is allowed, but it has to stay brief and say who can be served in it. That is not a preference: it is the Charter of the French Language.

Two articles cover the detail: Law 96 and your phone system, and how long the English option may run.

A bilingual menu and a French-first menu are also not the same structure. See building a French-first IVR.

Plan for what happens when nobody answers

A menu assumes somebody picks up behind every key. Business hours, holidays and overflow are half the work, and they are the half that gets forgotten.

Quebec's holiday calendar is not the same list as the rest of Canada. See Quebec statutory holidays in call routing.

What we do

Ringfully's call-flow builder assembles these pieces visually: menus, hours, queues and transfers, with one flow per number. We build it with you at setup.

One detail worth knowing if you record: the recording announcement is stored per organisation, and it is spoken on the call. In always mode the caller hears it before being connected. In the agent's-choice mode it plays just after an agent starts recording rather than before, because until then nobody knows there will be a recording. Leave the field empty and nothing is said while the recording still runs. The modes and the failure cases are set out on our recording policy page.