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Part 2 – Designing the Call Flow
In our second part of this three-part series (part 1 covered the sales meeting) on improving your sales, we look at the process of designing your client’s call flow. For traditional IT or Data technicians getting into IP telephony, one of the things that you need to learn is that a phone system sale is a consultative process. Unlike selling a server or workstation, which is typically finding the best machine within a given budget, a phone system sale requires that you really understand the processes that are used within a company to determine how calls need to be routed. This level of consultation requires that you not only understand the features of a particular system, but also that you understand the limitations and weaknesses of the product you are selling. Having a firm grasp of the abilities and weaknesses will help you to be able to translate the customer’s desired result into a working call flow design.
What is the call flow?
When we talk about the call flow, we are talking about how a call is routed through the system from the time the system answers the phone until it reaches a final destination. Some call flows are very simple with calls going into a ring group while most will need some form of IVR (Interactive Voice Response) menu system, also known as a Digital Receptionist, to route calls based on the caller’s keypresses (press 1 for sales, 2 for support, etc).
The Design Process
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The best way to design the call flow is to use a flowcharting tool like Microsoft Visio although products like Powerpoint, OpenOffice Draw, and even Photoshop can work as well. Whatever your tool of choice, a good drawing will present an easily understood visual diagram of how the phone system is supposed to function. This isn’t just important for showing the customer, it is also your template for programming the system.
One thing to keep in mind is that a poor call flow can make an otherwise perfect installation go horribly bad if callers are frustrated with the menus and calls are not getting to the people who are supposed to get them. In order to get the call flow to be as effective as possible you need to work closely with the client to determine their needs and desires and be able to implement that based on some basic design guidelines as well as the actual features of the product.
The best way to manage the call flow design process is to meet with the client and discuss what it is they are looking for, and hopefully get a diagram of what they want, then, take it back to your office to analyze it and come back with a finished design.
Basic Design Guidelines
Some of the best designed menus are short and simple with a limited number of options and sub-menus. Just think how frustrated you get when calling companies with vague options and you aren’t exactly sure which menu option to select. Here are some common guidelines that are used by some of the most effective designs:
- Keep each level simple
- Try to have no more than 3 menu choices per level
- Have good clean recordings
- Pay for professional recording if needed
- Walk through the design with each department involved
- Get input from multiple people, but be the coordinator
- Think about potential loops that people can get into
- Design a way to get out of a menu level and/or reach a human
- Minimizing key presses to get to destination
- Minimizing time on hold/ringing
By sticking to these basic guidelines, the callers will find what they are looking for faster, avoid complicated menus, and will therefor less likely to hangup.
Choosing Features to Implement
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While its usually better to keep a system as simple as possible to make ongoing maintenance and management easier, there is certainly a time and a place to implement different system features. Some of the primary features to consider include:
- Ring groups
- Do you have more people available to answer the phone than people calling in
- Call Queues
- Do you have more people calling in than people available to answer the phone
- Time Conditions
- Do you need to have different menus during non-business hours and/or holidays
Why is the call flow design your job?
Simply put, you are the expert. Whether this is your first job or your 100th, you are selling a vital component of someone’s business to them and you are the one that needs to know what they are doing. The customer may have a feeling for what they want but they usually don’t know much about how the phone system works and what features it has. You can’t just sell them the phone system and expect that they will be happy with trying to figure out how to program the IVR system by themselves.
Sample Scenarios
In order to see how this can all come together we can look at a typical small office and their needs and then expand on that as the company grows. In a small company, people often handle different types of calls and the volume of calls is generally low. To begin with, we will use the following information:
Bob – CEO x200
Dave – Sales Manager x201
Daniel – Shipping Manager x202
Sam – Support x203
Andrew – Sales x204
Jeff – Sales x205
From 9am – 5pm Monday – Friday calls to sales will ring to Andrew and Jeff, if they don’t answer, it will leave a voicemail for Dave. Calls to Support will go to Sam’s extension, and general customer service calls will go to Daniel. Now let’s take a look at the flowchart for this setup. After hours calls should go straight to voicemail.
In this diagram we have the calls being answered and sent through a time check, if the time is during office hours, then pressing 1 will go to a sales ring group containing 204 and 205, pressing 2 will send you directly to 203, and 4 will get you directly to 202.
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As the company grows, more calls are coming into sales and support and often times there are more calls coming in than the people can handle. The company would also like an option to play a message with office hours and directions. After hours, support calls will be sent to Sam’s cell phone. During business hours, Tracey (x207) will take calls directed to Billing.
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To accommodate these changes, queues were setup for sales and support to allow more callers to be able to call in than there are people available to answer the call. A new menu item was create for Billing and for the office hours announcement.
While these are still fairly simple examples, you can start to imagine what this would look like in a more complicated environment with multiple time conditions, operator groups, sub-menus, and other paths a call can go. It doesn’t take much to realize that without a good flowchart, trying to program the IVR system and then test it would be nearly impossible.
Series links
Part 1 – The Sales Meeting
Part 2 – Designing the call flow
Part 3 – The Quote
If you have some other good tips on designing a good call flow, please post them in the comments section below.