Auditing your voice menu in 30 minutes: call it yourself, count the steps, spot the dead ends

List the five main reasons people actually call you: an enquiry, booking an appointment, following up an order or a file, a complaint, a request for a specific person. This list comes from your teams or your recent messages, not from the organisation chart. Add a sixth scenario that stands out from the rest: the caller who finds no suitable option.

Prepare a grid with six columns: scenario, number of steps before getting an answer or a person, total duration, number of options heard, any blockage, overall impression. A sheet of paper or a spreadsheet will do.

Call from a mobile, preferably with a number your switchboard does not recognise, and time it. At each level, note the number of options offered, the sentence that introduces each choice, and whether the menu lets you go back or reach someone. Make at least one call outside opening hours and one at peak time: the menu is not the same when nobody can pick up.

Listen, too, to what is not said: a badly named option, internal vocabulary that the customer does not share (a department name, an acronym), a waiting time that is announced or not, a message that sends people to the website without offering an alternative. The Défenseur des droits (France’s national rights ombudsman), in its survey of telephone reception at four public services, found that users were very often sent to the organisation’s website, including those who said they had no equipment or had difficulties with the internet.

That survey, carried out with the Institut national de la consommation (INC, France’s national consumer institute), is based on 1,532 calls made from 26 September to 10 November 2022 to the Caf (family allowance fund), Pôle emploi (which became France Travail in 2024), the Assurance maladie (national health insurance) and the Assurance retraite (pension insurance). Its results: 40% of calls did not get through, and the average wait before reaching someone exceeded nine minutes, a minimum average since the investigators counted 15 minutes for each call left unanswered after three attempts; and the rate of satisfactory answers to a request for information never exceeded 60% depending on the platform.

The investigators also noted, for the Caf, that the waiting times announced by the voicemail did not match reality: a waiting message must be kept. These figures concern large public services in 2022: they do not describe your business and are not a target to aim for. The method, however, can be reused: several scenarios, several time slots, callers with different profiles. That is precisely what you can reproduce in-house.

Five questions are enough. Does the customer reach their goal without listening to unnecessary options? Is there, at every point, a way out to a person or to leaving a message? Is the vocabulary the customer’s? Are there no dead ends (endless loop, automatic hang-up, an option that sends you to a non-existent number)? Is the wait announced honestly? A single dead end is enough to justify an immediate fix.

Then count: if the same scenario takes more steps than two others, look at why. The menu structure is sometimes modelled on the internal organisation when the caller thinks in terms of need. Reordering the options according to the real frequency of requests is a simple fix to test.

Article L121-16 of the Consumer Code (Code de la consommation) provides that the number intended to receive a consumer’s call in order to obtain the proper performance of a contract or the handling of a complaint may not be premium-rate. A ministerial reply (a government minister’s written answer) to a parliamentary question recalls that a call to an after-sales service may not cost more than a standard call to a landline or a mobile (judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union of 2 March 2017) and specifies that a breach is punishable by an administrative fine of up to €3,000 for an individual and €15,000 for a legal entity (article L132-21 of the same code).

Article L224-38 of the same code, often cited, requires a non-geographic, landline, non-premium-rate number, at no cost other than that of the call itself, but it concerns providers of electronic communications services: it does not apply to every business. Check which category you belong to before citing it: the free waiting time it provides for applies to the customers of those operators, not to every business.

Sort your findings: dead ends first, unnecessary steps next, vocabulary last. Fix one thing at a time and repeat the same calls to compare. A keypad menu that works, with few options and a way out to a person, does not need to be replaced.

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