A business’ voicemail greeting is often the first point of contact with a business’ customers. Getting this greeting right can make a business sound professional and trustworthy. A badly-done greeting, on the other hand, can confuse and infuriate customers over the phone.
23. Hello, thank you for calling [business name]. Please leave your name, number, and a brief message, and a member of our team will return your call within 24 hours.

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.
Another possible solution is to give callers who don’t want to leave voicemails other ways to reach you, such as by emailing, texting or visiting your website. “Solve the caller’s problem in the voicemail greeting,” Baldwin suggests. If your outgoing message is informative enough, he says, callers won’t even need to leave a message.