IVR message examples: greetings, menus, after hours

An IVR is the automated phone menu that answers your callers and routes them with the keys on their phone: "For sales, press 1." What it says matters as much as how it is built. A long greeting or a badly ordered menu makes people hang up, while a well-written IVR sends each call to the right person the first time. This guide explains how an IVR works, then gives you message scripts to adapt for each situation, along with the rules that make a menu easy to use.

What is an IVR?

An IVR (interactive voice response) answers incoming calls automatically, plays recorded messages and routes the caller based on their choices. The caller presses a key, the phone sends the matching tone (a DTMF signal), and the IVR sends the call to a queue, an extension, a submenu or voicemail.

There are two kinds:

• Keypad IVR, by far the most common: callers choose with their keypad. Simple, reliable and understood by everyone.
• Speech recognition IVR, where callers say what they want. More flexible on paper, but it takes more tuning and makes more mistakes when there is background noise.

An IVR call flow is built from a handful of pieces:

How to write an IVR script: the basics

Callers hear an IVR message once, with no way to scroll back. Write it for the ear, not the eye.

1. 1Company name first. One sentence is enough to tell callers they are in the right place. Save the tagline for your website.
2. 2Option before key. "For billing, press 3" works better than "Press 3 for billing": callers recognize their request first, then remember the number.
3. 3Three to five options per menu, most requested first. With more, callers forget the start before they reach the end.
4. 4Two levels at most. A submenu makes sense for a high-volume department; three levels deep loses most callers.
5. 5Always a way to reach a person. One option to speak to someone, often 0, and a fallback when the caller presses nothing: replay the menu once, then send them to reception.
6. 6Short messages. Spoken English runs at about two and a half words per second: a 25-word greeting lasts around ten seconds, a four-option menu around twenty.
7. 7Useful information, not advertising. Before the menu, announce what saves a call (an ongoing outage, changed opening hours), not this month's promotion.
8. 8One voice and one volume level across every message, so the whole flow sounds consistent.

IVR greeting examples

Replace the parts in brackets with your own.

Simple greeting, no menu, for a small team where everyone picks up:

Greeting followed by a menu:

Bilingual greeting, as is common in Belgium: each language offers its own option, in that language. Here, French then Dutch:

Greeting with an update, when one issue suddenly drives a lot of calls:

IVR menu examples by industry

Real estate agency:

Online store:

Accounting firm:

Subscription customer service:

In each case, the order follows call volume: if half your calls are about order tracking, that option goes first.

Hold and overflow messages

Hold message:

Position announcement, repeated at regular intervals:

Callback offer:

Overflow to voicemail, when the wait gets too long:

A callback request or an overflow route beats "Your call is important to us" every twenty seconds: the caller gets a real solution, and you have one less abandoned call.

After-hours, holiday and vacation messages

After hours:

Public holiday:

Vacation closure:

Voicemail:

Check these messages every time your hours change: a closed message that still mentions last year's holidays sets the wrong tone from the very first second.

IVR mistakes that make callers hang up

Human voice or text-to-speech?

A studio-recorded voice sounds polished, but every change means another recording session. Text-to-speech turns a script into audio in seconds, which is handy when you update a closed message, add a holiday or run a menu in several languages. Today's synthetic voices sound natural enough for an IVR, as long as you write for them.

Either way:

• Write numbers the way they should be read. "9 a.m. to 6 p.m." reads well; a phone number is easier to follow when split into the groups people normally say.
• Listen to the result over the phone, not just on your computer: a phone line has a narrower sound.
• Keep the script of every message, so you know what it says without having to play it.

Measure and tune your IVR

Tune an IVR with data, not guesswork. Four metrics are enough to start:

• Abandons in the IVR: callers who hang up before choosing. A high abandon rate at this stage points to a greeting that runs too long or a confusing menu.
• Option breakdown: if an option is rarely used, drop it or move it down the menu.
• No-input calls: they show that some callers don't understand what you expect them to do.
• Share of calls to an agent: if most callers press 0, the menu doesn't match what they are calling about.

Review the flow every quarter and whenever you add a service, then compare the numbers before and after.

Build your IVR with OVOKY

In OVOKY, you design your IVR in a drag-and-drop visual editor:

• 8 step types: menu, announcement, queue, transfer, sub-IVR, business hours, voicemail and hang up.
• Keypad menus on all 12 keys (0 to 9, * and #), with a no-input timeout and a maximum number of attempts per menu. Speech recognition is not available.
• Weekly hours and holidays, which automatically route calls to your closed message and voicemail.
• Recorded messages (WAV or MP3) or messages generated with text-to-speech in 28 languages, plus a multilingual option.
• Queues with callback: hold music, position announcements, a callback request that creates a lead in the linked outbound campaign, and 5 overflow options.
• An IVR analysis report to see what callers do in your menus.