Call Flow Design Best Practice

Hey All,

Can anyone recommend any good guides for call flow / IVR design / best practice? Im more of a teccie and in the past would build pre defined flows, however im now starting to get more involved with the business side of things and have been asked to review and improve the existing flows. I need a quick guide to best practice on IVR trees etc etc…. Im sure there are tried and tested theories out there but not really sure where to look.

Any guidance much appreciated….

Thanks in advance.

Question asked by IVRDude

Are these tips any good?

28 Hot Tips to Improve your IVR

With thanks to Jonty

Your flow plan won’t be able to do everything

I haven’t got a lot of experience, so don’t take my word as gospel, but I have a new phone system arriving imminently and am in the process of drawing up some new routing plans myself, and have come to the conclusion that your flow plan won’t be able to do everything.

It’s easy to look at the list of features and functions available and say yes to 95% of them (after all if they weren’t good things to have vendors wouldn’t sell them).

• You should decide what do you want the flow plans main objective to be?
• Reduce contacts through self serve?
• Optimise customer experience?
• Optimise profitability?

Although they are in some cases not exclusive, in others they are.

A good example would be, I have some sales calls, and some of my agents are exceptional at adding value, but they talk till the cows come home. Do I choose to send all calls to them, and focus on profit, or do I recognise that I could handle more calls, and provide a quicker answer time if I give them the straight forward calls where they won’t chat?

I’m building 3 separate plans that focus on each of those three mentioned points, with a trigger to switch between them depending on resource demand.

It’s easy enough to do a mish mash between everything, but if you are trying to maximise profit by putting new customers/business to the front of the queue, but then trying to give a great service loyal customers preference, and always sending them to the original agent who dealt with them, but at the same time making them go through 4 levels of IVR, the experience won’t really match up, as the different objectives conflict.

This is probably obvious stuff, but I thought I would mention it just in case.

With thanks to KevinP

We Had A Change In the IVR

Hi IVR Guy,

I work for am insurance company which deal with Life insurance.Recently we had a change in the IVR.

The reason behind it was to get two seperate cue’s for Life & Health insurance inquiries as we needed to track how many inbound calls we receive from the two respective products. I was recently recruited to this place & i felt this change should have planned at the initial stage of setting up the IVR which cost the company some good money to do the change nearly after 1 year of implementation.

So when you decide on a IVR tree please have your concern on the reporting side as well.

Also in my view, Today the people don’t want to call & listen to all what is playing through the IVR…My earlier work place believed in HUMAN TOUCH & without getting things complicated they just made it to connect the line directly to the agent which i think was really good.Some of the clients who called us appreciate this attempt.

I don’t know how the things are in your place but its always good to keep things as simple as possible.Just wanted to share my experience with you & I don’t know whether this info is going to help your purpose.

With thanks to Srikanth

Author: Jonty Pearce