Menus arrive: a greeting, keys that lead somewhere, and a plan for callers who press nothing.
Pidgin Talk can now answer with a menu.
Building one
A menu has four parts:
- a greeting, which is a recording you upload,
- up to twelve keys, each leading somewhere,
- how many times to play the greeting and how long to wait for a key,
- and where to send a caller who never presses anything that counts.
That last part matters more than people expect. A good share of callers press nothing, either because they are driving or because they are waiting for a person. They should end up somewhere sensible, not in a loop.
The pages grow up a little
Menus were the fifth thing to manage, and five links in a row of plain text was starting to look like a ransom note. So the pages got their first color: a blue bar across the top, and a typeface someone actually chose.
Where a key can lead
A person, a person's mailbox, another menu, or a polite goodbye. Pressing a key cuts the greeting short, so regular callers do not have to hear it through.
Everything a call can be sent to is the same kind of thing inside the system, which we call a target. A menu key points at a target. So does an incoming number. As new kinds of destination are added, every place that can point at one gets them for free.
One call, many sounds
A caller might hear a greeting, press a key, hear ringing, get no answer, and leave a message. That is four different sources of sound on one call, and it plays as a single unbroken stream. The plumbing we did for hold music last year is what makes that work.
A tip
Keep the greeting short and put the most common choice first. Nobody has ever wished a phone menu were longer.