Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Professional or higher, Talk Professional or higher |
| Access | Admin |
Yes. A menu can route callers differently outside opening hours, and it needs a reason to exist beyond that.
Can an IVR behave differently after hours?
A menu greets the caller and offers options, and it can behave differently inside and outside your schedule. Out of hours it might play a message, offer voicemail, or route an urgent option to an on-call group.
Know the default before you design around it: where a schedule is applied to a number, calls arriving outside it go straight to that number's voicemail. If you want something else, you turn voicemail off outside hours and route those calls to a different number instead.
Where it earns its place
- An emergency route that is genuinely different from ordinary support.
- Several teams with clearly different purposes, such as sales and support.
- Languages, where the caller's choice is obvious to them.
When is it the wrong answer?
A menu with six options named after your departments. Callers do not know your structure, they pick the first plausible option, and you have added twenty seconds and a wrong routing to every call.
Zendesk's own guidance is to stay near five options and three levels. We would go further: two or three options a customer can answer without thinking, and one level, unless you can name the caller who needs the second.
The out-of-hours message matters more
For most organisations, a good out-of-hours greeting saying when you open and offering voicemail does more than a menu. It answers the caller's actual question, which is whether anyone is there.
Designing a call flow? Tell us how your teams are split and what happens out of hours and we will help you build something callers can navigate.
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