A phone greeting that sounds like a real business.

Why the phone greeting is worth getting right

Most businesses spend months on a website that a customer looks at once, and thirty seconds on the recording that every caller hears before they are allowed to speak. The greeting is the only part of your brand that people are forced to listen to all the way through, and a message recorded on a mobile in a car park tells callers exactly how much attention they should expect once they get through.

It is also the cheapest professional recording you will ever buy, because phone work is priced by word count and greetings are short. Three or four recordings together usually cost less than an hour of almost any other professional service.

The order to record them in

Start with the three that every business needs: the main greeting, the after-hours version and the voicemail message. Those three cover every hour of the week and take a voice about ten minutes to record. Add the options menu if calls route to departments, the holiday closure if you shut down at any point in the year, and an on-hold message only if people genuinely wait, because a hold message that plays for four seconds is just noise.

Writing for the ear, and for the phone line

Phone audio is compressed, narrow and often played through a speaker in a noisy room. That changes how you write. Keep sentences short and put the useful information first: callers are listening for the thing they rang about, not for your mission statement. Avoid numbers that are hard to hold in the head, spell out anything ambiguous, and never open with a long company description, because the caller already knows who they rang.

For menus, always say the department before the key. "For accounts, press two" is remembered; "press two for accounts" makes people listen twice. Keep menus to four options or fewer, and always offer a way to reach a person, because the option nobody offers is the one everybody wants.

What to send, and what comes back

Send every script in one casting rather than one at a time. The price follows the total word count, so recording six short greetings together costs a fraction of booking six separate jobs, and you get the same voice across all of them, which is what makes a phone system sound like one company rather than several.

Say which phone system you use. Hosted systems, on-premise handsets and call-centre platforms all want particular formats, sample rates and file names, and a voice who records phone work every week will deliver files that upload without conversion. If you want music under an on-hold message, send a licensed track or ask for royalty-free, and add production so the mix is done properly rather than layered together by you at eleven at night.

Keeping it current

Greetings go stale in a way websites do not. Opening hours change, departments merge, and the holiday message from two years ago is still telling callers you reopen on a date that has passed. Re-record the set once a year with the same voice, or whenever something material changes, and keep the original scripts so the update is a small job rather than a rewrite.