Hello, you have reached the dental office of Dr. X. We are busy assisting a patient now, but will call you back as soon as possible. Please leave your name, reason for calling, and your number. If this is an urgent enquiry, please call 911. In this case, the dentist is giving a reason for not being available and they’re providing a way to prioritize the patients who need the most help. They’re also leaving an emergency number for the most severe of situations.
We’re keeping it simple with this one. Just a few basic elements to help you get started. As long as you know who your audience is, the message you wish to convey, and the information you need from the caller, the rest should fall into place quite nicely. Let’s face it, a voicemail greeting for a lumber company will probably be different than that of a psychologist’s office. One greeting is aimed at securing potential customers, and the other is geared towards appointments, more or less. Once you are certain who your caller is, the better your voicemail. Center on your audience, first and foremost. Knowing what to relate ensures that your caller will leave the right message. For instance, if you’re a retail store, you would include your hours of operations, and perhaps any specials that you’re running. If you are a therapist’s office, then you’d need to include an alternate number in case a patient is having an issue and requires immediate help. Again, this will vary depending on the business. Here, a therapist would definitely request the caller leave their contact information. However, a retail store chain might not request that. There are also complex voicemail systems such as those used by mobile phone services, which ask you to press a certain number on your phone, where you are asked to leave your account information. Again, as you can see, it all boils down to the demographics of your callers, and what you need from them to conduct the best business possible. Depending on the situation, your caller might be in a good mood or not. In either case, they’ll probably be eagerly awaiting your call. So, it stands to reason that you only promise them a call back if you can deliver. In other words, if you’re a small shop and you’ve decided to close due to a much-needed sabbatical, then don’t leave a voicemail greeting where you promise them to call right back. However, if you have an active customer service staff, then you can promise to return their call within the same day.

If your landline doesn’t have a way to save messages already built in, the best way to save that gorgeous message is with a recorder. But before you rush out to get it, don’t forget that most smartphones have a built in recorder. Try that first and see if it will pick up her voice loud and strong. It should save the message as an MP3 automatically, that you can send (via email or text) directly to your computer for safe keeping. If the quality is not great, then you can borrow a recorder or purchase one. We like the Olympus brand ourselves, because they save in MP3 and can upload to a computer wirelessly. We have the vtech phone/answering system indicated above. The outgoing message/greeting is of my young daughter’s voice and we would like to save it somehow. Am wondering if you have a process or can suggest how an outgoing/greeting message can be downloaded for safekeeping.
Do you find yourself putting pen to paper, staring blankly at the wall, searching for just what to say? Well, know that it happens to the best of us. To help you out, we’ve included some voicemail greeting samples for you to look at. Both the 10 formal and 10 informal samples should give you the prompting you need to start crafting your own voicemail script.