Great question @Steve White, and the good news is it's a config pattern rather than a limitation. Here are a set of options that you can follow, let me know if you have further questions!
Why you're hearing both prompts
You have two separate announcement layers, and only one of them knows what time it is.
Your Auto Attendant holds the schedule, so it correctly picks the lunch or after-hours prompt. The Ring Group, however, has no schedule awareness. Its announcement is attached to the ring group itself, so it plays on every call that reaches it, including calls the AA has already greeted with a closed message. And because an announcement can't be suppressed from upstream, the AA has no way to tell the ring group to stay quiet.
So the fix comes down to one of two shapes: stop sending closed-hours calls into the ring group, or take the messaging off the ring group entirely.
Option A: Don't route lunch or after-hours calls to the ring group (most common fix)
Nobody is answering during those windows anyway, so the ring group isn't doing useful work there. In Admin Console, repoint just those schedule branches:
- Lunch → a voicemail box whose greeting is your lunch message, or a small "Lunch" auto attendant that plays the lunch prompt and then drops to voicemail
- After hours → the same pattern with your after-hours prompt
The ring group then stays reachable only from the open-hours branch, which is exactly when its "during business hours" announcement is correct. You don't have to touch the ring group at all, and each prompt still lives in exactly one place.
Option B: Make the auto attendant the single source of truth
Remove the announcement from the ring group so it becomes a simple destination that just rings phones, and move that wording into the AA's open-hours greeting instead. All three messages then sit side by side in the one place that owns your schedule, which is much easier to audit and update later.
This is worth doing even alongside Option A if the ring group is ever reachable from more than one path.
Option C: Use a Call Queue instead of a Ring Group
If the business-hours announcement is genuinely valuable to callers like wait messaging, "your call is important to us", a Call Queue is the better fit. Queues carry their own schedule and closed-hours handling, so the announcement can be time-scoped rather than unconditional. Two things to confirm first: that your licensing covers call queues, and that queue ring behaviour matches what your team expects, since it differs from a ring group's.
Two things worth checking while you're in there
First, the ring group's no-answer destination. If unanswered calls roll to a voicemail box with a business-hours greeting, that's a third overlapping prompt waiting to catch you out. You should point closed-hours paths at a mailbox with a matching greeting.
Second, the timezone and daylight-saving setting on the AA schedule. If the boundaries ever feel a few minutes or a full hour off after a clock change, that's usually the cause rather than the prompts themselves.
------------------------------
Mattics Phi
------------------------------