Record your voicemail greeting

Go to Phone›Voicemail. If it says No custom greeting set, callers who reach your voicemail hear a bare tone with no explanation.

That is worth thirty seconds of your time. A beep with no greeting makes people hang up, because they are not sure they reached the right place.

Record it

1. Go to Phone›Voicemail.
2. Click Record, speak, then click Stop.
3. Or use Choose File to upload one instead. MP3 or WAV are preferred; other formats are converted automatically. Maximum 10MB.

This greeting is account-wide

There is one voicemail greeting for the whole account, not one per IVR node or per number. Every path that ends in voicemail uses it — a caller who picks "leave a message" from your IVR menu, and a caller whose call was not answered.

Write it so it makes sense from either direction. Something like:

Leave me your name, your number, and a sentence about what you need, and I'll get back to you. Go ahead after the tone.

Making it sound good

Phone audio throws away everything below about 300 Hz and above 3.4 kHz, so a recording that sounds warm in your headphones can land thin on a handset.

• Record somewhere soft — a room with rugs and curtains, or a closet with clothes in it. Never a bathroom or a kitchen.
• Speak past the microphone rather than straight into it, about a hand's width away. That one change removes the popping on hard "p" sounds.
• Say the line out loud once before you record it. A read greeting sounds read.
• Then call your own number and listen on an actual phone, not on your computer.