(Note that behind door #3, the caller has been made to endure 15 seconds of useless ringing during which he could easily have reached his party through an AA menu.)

We are definitely going to have a backdoor as well. In fact, we’re going a step further — we’re a small enough company that we can afford to assign DIDs like candy, bypassing both random humans and AA menus entirely.

Regarding the social contact issue, we’ll have to agree to disagree. While I obviously value interaction with friends and family, I don’t feel a great deal of enlightenment when I speak to a busy, harried receptionist for the five seconds that it takes to ask for a transfer to a given extension. If you do, more power to you.

To me any level of phone tree spells “cheap” with the font size increasing directly with phone tree level. Even a 0-order tree (AA says, “Re-directing your call to the next available operator”) tells me that the company wasn’t willing to spend the money to hire humans to interact with me on a personal and social level.

So in summary, I agree with Christian… mostly. I think that a reasonable solution would be to have two main numbers, one which dumps you directly to a HumanOperator(tm) during business hours, and a second (back door) which dumps you to a phone tree (with a “press 0 for operator” switch). This is one of the (few) IT related things that my company has done right. I can dial one number to go directly to someone’s desk (in fact a pause then extension in my direct-dial allows me to “skip” even the AA), and I can pass out a second number which heads directly to our receptionists so that we appear to be a company who cares about our customers :-). Perhaps something similar would appease all sides of your situation as well?

Really? Don’t get me wrong — I hate phone trees from hell just as much as the next guy, but I think that as long as the very first option presented is “To reach an operator at any time, dial zero”, and the remainder of the menu is a simple, one-level structure, you have the best of both worlds. People who want human contact are one easy, quick button press away from it, and those of us who prefer *not* to speak to random humans just to be transferred to an extension or a group aren’t forced to do so.