Abstract: An automated telephone answering device is provided in a telephone answering system with a human operator, for automatic routing of incoming calls when the human operator is overloaded. The automated telephone answering device measures the service level being routed by the human operator, and when that service level exceeds a parameter which indicates that the human operator is overloaded and cannot reasonably service further incoming calls, an automatic routing device is enabled to automatically rout some incoming calls to their destinations. The automatic routing device receives incoming codes from an incoming caller and processses these codes to specify a destination.