Building an Auto Attendant is a multi-stage process. The auto attendant consists of two pieces: a schedule and menus. First, build your attendant menu(s) and then build the schedule. By default each account has one auto attendant. Additional auto attendants are add-on services with a monthly fee.

Menus, also referred to as "Call Trees", greet callers and provide callers with options to choose to reach their desired destination. A menu might sound like this, "Thank you for calling ABC Company. Press 1 to dial by extension, Press 2 to dial by name, Press 3 for Sales, Press 4 for Customer Service." Many companies will build multiple menus to address greeting callers during business hours, after hours, on holidays, etc. Go to the article "Building Auto Attendant Menus" for instruction.

Once your menus are built, you will create the schedule. The schedule is found under the "Auto Attendant" tab.

To edit your auto auto attendant schedule:

Login to http://www.aptela.com/my-account as the admin

1. Click on the Phone Numbers tab
2. Click on the Auto Attendant tab
3. You will be presented with a default "Main Auto Attendant" schedule (or choose from the pick list if you have multiple schedules)
4. Click on Edit. A pop-up will open with your current schedule

Schedule Editor

The schedule editor is broken into Day Groups. Within each day group are Timeslots for the 24-hour cycle of that day. A group slot has the following options:

• Days.  Check the box to identify which days of the week this schedule slot is .
• Time Slider.  The time sliders set the time when calls will be routed to the associated menu.
• Menu.  Choose the attendant menu that should play for this time period.
• Add Timeslot. Add as many timeslots as needed to account for all hours within the day.
• Save. Your schedule will not go live until you press Save.
• Cancel. Clicking on Cancel will ignore any changes that have been made.

To add another day group, click on Add Day Group at the bottom of window.

A common configuration may have a one day slot for Monday through Friday with 3 timeslots:  off-hours AM, business hours, off-hours PM with both off-hours time slots pointing to the same off-hours menu.  Then is a second day slot for the weekend with all day set up to route to off-hours menu.

However, you can create your own unique variations. For example, creating a special lunch hours auto attendant or auto attendants with custom greetings for the morning versus the afternoon.

Be sure to click Save to apply your work.