The test (ten points, ten minutes)
- How many times does the phone ring before anything happens? After five or six rings with no response, callers start hanging up.
- What do you hear when nobody answers: a professional message, a default carrier recording, or silence?
- Is the information in your message still correct? Old opening hours, departed colleagues and expired promotions often linger for years.
- Call outside business hours: is that announced, or does the phone just ring endlessly?
- Do you have a phone menu? Pick every option once and check that each digit actually leads somewhere.
- Get yourself put on hold: do you hear music and an occasional message, or dead silence?
- Leave a voicemail and see how long it takes before someone listens to it. If the answer is "days", is your greeting promising too much?
- Listen to the quality: does the message crackle, is the volume low, does it sound distorted? Then the system probably holds a file in the wrong format.
- Does the voice match your business? A hasty self-recorded message next to a polished website is a style clash callers genuinely notice.
- Finally, check your Google Business Profile: do the opening hours and number there match what you just heard?
What to do with the outcome
Most points can be fixed the same day. Outdated or missing messages are replaced within minutes via the greeting maker; if a message sounds distorted, see our audio-format guide; and if hold means silence, the hold-music page is your next stop. For the menu and the queue we have separate guides with example scripts.