If a customer has to press seven options on an automated phone menu just to find out when your shop closes, you have not built a customer service system. You have built a monument to your own internal org chart. The information they need takes three seconds to say out loud. The journey you've made them take to get it tells them everything about how much you value their time.

This is not a niche problem. It is one of the most common, most avoidable, and most revealing failures in customer experience design — and it happens because organisations build Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems around what's convenient for their departments, not what's useful to their customers.

What Is an IVR System, and Why Do They Go Wrong So Reliably?

An IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system is the automated telephone menu that greets callers before they reach a human agent. At its best, it routes people efficiently to the right place. At its worst — which is most of the time — it is a self-service bureaucracy that makes callers feel like they've submitted a planning application just to ask a simple question.

They go wrong reliably because they are almost always designed from the inside out. Someone maps the company's internal departments onto a phone menu, adds a compliance message, buries the most common queries three levels down because Legal wanted a disclaimer first, and calls it done. The customer's actual journey is an afterthought.

I've sat in the meetings where this happens. They're very long. There's usually a spreadsheet.

Why does a seven-level IVR even exist?

A seven-level IVR exists because nobody at the design stage asked: "What does the person calling actually want?" Instead, they asked: "How do we make sure every department feels represented?" These are very different questions with very different outcomes.

According to research by Salesforce, 83% of customers expect to interact with someone immediately when they contact a company. A seven-level IVR is the opposite of immediacy. It is the telephone equivalent of being handed a form to fill in before anyone will acknowledge you exist.

Is Putting Store Hours Behind a Complex IVR Actually Harmful?

Yes — measurably so. Customer effort is one of the strongest predictors of churn. The Customer Effort Score (CES) — a metric developed from research by Gartner — consistently shows that reducing effort is more important to loyalty than delighting customers. Making someone navigate seven menus to find your opening times is maximum effort for minimum value.

A 2022 study by Vonage found that 61% of customers will switch to a competitor after just one poor service experience. The person calling to check if you're open on a bank holiday is not a difficult customer. But they will become a former customer if you treat a simple question as if it requires a security clearance.

What does excessive IVR complexity actually cost an organisation?

The costs are both direct and indirect. On the direct side: call abandonment rates spike sharply after 40 seconds of IVR navigation, meaning your contact centre handles more repeat calls from frustrated people who gave up the first time. On the indirect side: the brand damage is quiet but cumulative.

Nobody posts on LinkedIn about a smooth phone call. But they absolutely tell their friends about the time they spent four minutes pressing buttons to find out a shop was closed on Sundays.

What Should Be at the Top of an IVR Menu — and What Shouldn't?

The rule is straightforward: the most frequently requested information should require the fewest steps. This sounds obvious. It apparently isn't, given how many menus bury "opening hours" under "General Enquiries" → "Store Information" → "Branch Locator" → "Hours and Accessibility" → "Select Your Region."

How do you find out what customers actually call about?

You look at your call data. Most organisations have it. Fewer than you'd think actually use it to design their IVR. Call reason analysis — categorising why people ring — typically reveals that 60–70% of inbound calls fall into fewer than five categories. Build your menu around those categories, not around your departments.

If "store hours" or "opening times" appears in your top ten call reasons, and it almost always does, it should be reachable in a single step — or better yet, handled by a brief recorded message at the very start of the call before the menu even begins.

IVR Design: What Good Looks Like vs What Most Organisations Actually Do

Why Do Organisations Keep Building Bad IVR Systems Despite Knowing Better?

This is the question I find most interesting, because the answer is almost never "we didn't know." It's usually one of three things.

1. The system was designed by people who will never use it

Senior stakeholders who commission IVR systems rarely ring their own contact centres. If they did — anonymously, as a customer — most of these systems would be redesigned within a fortnight. The people who understand the problem aren't in the room where the decisions get made.

I've run transformation programmes where the single most effective intervention was making the executive team call their own helpline. The silence in the room afterwards is usually quite productive.

2. Internal politics gets baked into the menu

When you ask eight department heads to sign off on an IVR design, you tend to end up with eight departments represented in the menu — regardless of whether customers ever call about seven of them. IVR menus are sometimes less a customer tool and more a political settlement.

3. Nobody measured the cost of getting it wrong

If your organisation tracks call abandonment, repeat contact rates, and customer effort scores — and links them back to specific IVR design choices — you have the evidence to make the case for change. Most organisations track these metrics loosely, if at all, and so the bad IVR persists because nobody can definitively prove what it's costing.

What Are the Alternatives to a Complex IVR for Simple Information Requests?

The honest answer is that a customer should rarely need to call to find out your opening hours in 2024. That information should be on your website, your Google Business Profile, your social media pages, and answered by any basic AI chat tool. If people are calling to ask, it usually means one of two things: your digital presence is insufficient, or they don't trust it to be accurate.

Practical alternatives worth considering

• Google Business Profile: Free, widely used, and the first place most people look. Keep it updated. This alone deflects a significant volume of "what time do you open?" calls.
• Proactive IVR announcement: Play opening hours as part of the initial greeting before the menu starts. Callers who only needed that information can hang up. Job done.
• SMS or web chat deflection: Offer callers the option to receive information by text or access a chat tool during the IVR flow.
• Conversational AI: Modern natural language IVR systems allow callers to simply say what they want. "What time do you open on Saturday?" is answered immediately, without menus. The technology is mature, accessible, and not especially expensive compared to the cost of poorly handled call volumes.
• Callback and self-service integration: For anything more complex, give callers the option to receive a callback rather than holding — and ensure your IVR integrates with your CRM so agents have context when they ring back.

How Should You Audit and Redesign an Existing IVR System?

If you've inherited a seven-level IVR and need to fix it, here is a practical sequence that doesn't require a six-month transformation programme and a consultancy invoice the size of a mortgage.

Step-by-step IVR audit process

1. Pull your call reason data. If you don't have it, implement call tagging immediately. You cannot redesign what you haven't measured.
2. Rank your top 10 call reasons by volume. These are the things your IVR must handle well. Everything else is secondary.
3. Map the current journey for each of those top 10. Count the steps. Time the experience. Do this as a customer, not as an employee who knows the shortcuts.
4. Identify what can be deflected entirely. Opening hours, basic FAQs, appointment confirmations — these should not require a human agent and should be reachable in one step or zero steps.
5. Redesign the menu structure around customer tasks, not departments. If this causes internal politics, that is a leadership problem to solve, not a reason to perpetuate a bad menu.
6. Test with real customers before going live. Not internal staff. Real customers who don't know the system.
7. Set a review cadence and stick to it. Call reasons change. Your IVR should change with them.

The Broader Point: IVR Is a Mirror, Not Just a Menu

I've used the IVR menu as a specific example throughout this piece, but the principle it illustrates applies across every customer-facing system and process an organisation runs. When you design for your own convenience rather than your customer's, the customer notices — even if they can't always articulate exactly why.

The seven-level IVR is just the most honest version of something organisations do constantly: they take a customer's need, run it through their internal structure, and hand back something that technically addresses the need while making the customer feel like an inconvenience.

The question worth asking of every customer process — not just the phone menu — is this: whose convenience does this actually serve? The answer is usually more revealing than any audit.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the maximum number of levels an IVR menu should have?

Best practice guidance from contact centre specialists such as NICE and Genesys consistently recommends a maximum of three levels, with the most common customer tasks accessible at level one. Beyond three levels, call abandonment rates increase significantly and customer satisfaction scores decline.

Why do customers hate IVR systems so much?

Primarily because of the mismatch between effort and outcome. Customers ring with a specific, often simple need. A complex IVR imposes significant effort — listening, remembering options, navigating levels — for what feels like a trivially small result. Research by Gartner consistently shows that high-effort interactions are the primary driver of customer disloyalty, more so than individual service failures.

Is there a legal requirement around IVR accessibility in the UK?

Under the Equality Act 2010, organisations have a duty to make reasonable adjustments for disabled customers. A complex IVR can present genuine barriers for people with hearing impairments, cognitive difficulties, or conditions affecting fine motor control. Ofcom also publishes guidance for communications providers on accessible customer service. This is not a theoretical risk — it is an active compliance consideration.

How do I calculate the cost of a poorly designed IVR?

Start with three metrics: call abandonment rate (calls lost before resolution), repeat contact rate (customers ringing back because they didn't get what they needed), and average handle time for calls that were routed incorrectly. Multiply each by your cost-per-contact. The number is usually uncomfortable enough to justify an IVR redesign project on its own.

What is "natural language IVR" and is it worth the investment?

Natural language IVR uses voice recognition and AI to allow callers to describe their need in their own words ("I want to know what time your Birmingham store closes on Sunday") rather than navigating a menu structure. For organisations with high inbound call volumes and diverse query types, the investment typically pays back within 12–18 months through reduced agent handling time and improved first-contact resolution. For smaller organisations, the cost-benefit case is less clear-cut.

Should opening hours ever be on an IVR menu at all?

Ideally, no. Opening hours should be so easily findable online — via Google, your website, and social channels — that calling to ask should be rare. If you're still receiving significant call volume about opening times, that is a signal your digital presence is either insufficient or not trusted. Fix the source, rather than building a slightly better phone menu around the symptom.

How often should an IVR system be reviewed?

At minimum, quarterly — and immediately following any significant change to your services, locations, or operating hours. IVR systems that were designed once and never revisited are among the most common sources of customer frustration I encounter in organisations. The phone menu from 2019 is not fit for purpose in 2024. It almost certainly wasn't fit for purpose in 2021 either.

Nicholas Hodder is a digital transformation and technology leader with over 20 years of experience across public sector, charity, and commercial organisations. He works with leadership teams on the gap between technology strategy and the reality of what actually happens when real customers try to use it. He has sat in enough IVR design meetings to find them genuinely funny, and is available to speak at your conference — provided you don't make him navigate a seven-level menu to confirm the venue address.