Efficient Contact Centers: Custom Call Flows

Every organization wants its contact center to be as efficient and effective as possible. Serving the needs of your customers shouldn’t be complicated or too technical to improve. With the right Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) software, you can implement customizable call flows. With this technological feature, you can see dramatic improvements in your contact center operations.

What Are Customizable Call Flows?

A call flow is like a roadmap of how you handle calls from customers. When they are customizable, you can define precisely the path you want calls to take. Call flows are tools for addressing both simple and complex customer calls.

Customizable call flows can include Interactive Voice Response (IVR) as well as specific routing based on the customer’s needs.

How Do You Develop Customizable Call Flows?

Designing your call flow has many considerations and dependencies. To begin the process of customizing your call flows, it’s a good idea to look at your contact center analytics. This valuable data can provide you insights on the most common reasons that customers call you. From this data, you can begin to plan out the two aspects of call flows: the IVR and routing.

Setting Up Your IVR

An IVR is an automated telephony system that is the first interaction most callers have with your business. An IVR can gather information or direct callers to answers or information resources, including information on checking balances, getting directions to your location, or other simple queries.

IVRs can also be more sophisticated when the customer’s challenges aren’t easily solvable. In that case, you want the IVR to be able to route the caller to the best agent.

IVRs have historically been difficult to program. However, we recently launched Easy-IVR. This new feature uses a wizard-driven experience. You’ll be able to manage the flow of calls better with this tool. Easy-IVR is the simplest way to reap the benefits of a strategic IVR.

IVRs also enable multi-lingual support and can integrate with your CRM (customer relationship management) platform so that agents have access to customer details as soon as they begin the call.

Call Flow Routing

Omni-channel routing is the second aspect of your call flows. Your distribution system can route incoming calls to an agent with the right skillset while minimizing hold time. The features of omni-channel routing for call flows include:

• Intelligent routing: Based on responses to the IVR, you can route customers to the most relevant group of agents. Having this capability ensures the best interactions and can improve first-call resolution metrics. This functionality is especially helpful for enterprises that offer a variety of products.
• Consistent experiences in callbacks: Customers can request the same agent, enhancing the personalization of calls. Callers having to explain the situation to multiple people often leads to frustration. This option can reduce this.
• Multiple channels: Call flows don’t just correspond to the telephone. Customers now have other ways to contact you, including email and chat. With omni-channel routing, all these channels converge so that your agents can address all interactions in a timely and effective manner.

What Are the Benefits of Customizable Call Flows?

Looking at the features above, it’s easy to see why having a well-designed call flow can benefit your contact center and business. A customizable call flow that uses both IVR and strategic routing provides a better customer experience and can improve agent productivity and effectiveness. Call flows deliver an efficient process that makes interactions easier.

Call Flows Are Flexible

Is there a perfect call flow? There’s no one right way to set up a call flow. Rather, it’s flexible, and it can evolve over time. It goes back to planning based on the trends you see in your contact center analytics. Call flows should also change when factors demand it.

You probably had to rethink your contact center operations because of the pandemic. Customers had new, unique questions that required a rework of the blueprint. As 2021 draws near, the world is hardly back to business as normal, so you’ll need to keep working on your call flows with analytics and data as your guide. 

Customizable Call Flows Lead to Better Experiences

Remember, a successful call flow should be a roadmap for what your customer experiences. How you structure the flow has everything to do with their experience. Learn more about customizable call flows with our UCaaS software by exploring the product details.

Kirsten Barta

Kirsten Barta is Sr Marketing Communications Manager at Intermedia