d. Utilizing Ambiguity Over Clarity: When setting up your voicemail greeting be direct and to the point. Tell callers your information, a brief greeting, and direction—i.e. “Hi, this is Jim Shamalam (from Iron Industries). Sorry I can’t take your call right now. Please leave your name number, and a brief message and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Thank you.” This is ideal, as you inform callers and let them know what they should do to ensure a return call. A lack of direction can lead to callers leaving incomplete messages (lacking contact or other information) or even callers hanging up without leaving a message altogether.
Departments and teams are typically organized by function – customer service, tech support, sales, billing questions, etc. When a team is busy handling other calls, encourage your callers to leave a message and reassure them that you will get back to them within a reasonable time frame. It’s important that you actually follow through to avoid upsetting your callers.

Users often don’t invest enough time into their messages, resulting in incomplete, unprofessional, or otherwise under-whelming greetings. Sure, crafting a greeting doesn’t sound all that complicated; however, there are a number of pitfalls users can fall into—i.e. informality, terseness, sincerity, lack of direction, and more. While none of these sound too catastrophic, they are often interrelated. As such, they tend to worsen any problem. For example, humor can cause informality, worsen ambiguity, and weaken sincerity. That being said, users should strive to avoid ALL these pitfalls.
On occasion the option to send a call straight to voicemail is not available. If it is determined that the recipient does have a voicemail box but the Voice Mail option does not appear as in the screenshot above, this is likely because the recipient is a Skype for Business on Mac user.