Call flow is the entire path your customer takes when they contact your call center or business. This includes the automated greetings menu selection, hold time, conversation with agents, transfers to other agents, and so on.

Taking a small amount of time to review call flows can have a big impact on customer experience. You might be able to decrease the time they wait, get them to the right person faster, or even successfully deflect their call to a self-service option they are thrilled to use.

Most business phone systems and call center software offer tools to visualize and analyze call flow. Here’s how to improve it at every step of the journey, from greeting to resolution.

Four simple steps to improve call flow

1. Simplify Interactive Voice Response menus

When people call in, the first voice they hear is often the greeting menu, which is part of your IVR system. From there, the IVR guides callers through a series of options, allowing them to choose the path that best suits their needs. IVR is often the voice that initially greets every caller.

Take a look at the IVR menus. Do you have any long menus that take more than 30 seconds to listen to? Are you offering seven or eight options to callers at every step?

You can break these rules, but how many decision trees do you want to force callers into?

Creating tons of options may seem like you’re giving your callers “more,” but what customers really want is to quickly and easily find the information they need or reach the appropriate department. If your IVR menu can’t do that, it will likely lead to frustration and even a negative first impression of your company.

So simplifying these menus is a critical step in streamlining the call flow process. Here are actionable ways to do so.

• Limit menu options: A good rule of thumb is that your IVR menu should have no more than five options per menu level. This limitation helps prevent confusion and ensures that callers aren’t overwhelmed by choices.
• Shorten messages: Messages should be concise and to the point. Lengthy introductions or explanations can frustrate callers who are seeking immediate assistance. So try and keep each menu message no longer than 20-30 seconds.
• Offer a callback option: Implementing a callback feature can alleviate caller frustration during peak hours, ensuring that they’re not left waiting on hold for extended periods. For example, after a minute on hold, your IVR could offer to automatically call back the customer when it’s their turn, without losing their spot in line.
• Use Natural Language Processing: Incorporating NLP allows the IVR system to understand and process spoken responses from callers, making the navigation process more intuitive and less restrictive. With a conversational IVR, for example, a caller could simply say “billing question” or “schedule an appointment,” and the NLP-enabled IVR would route them to the appropriate service without pressing any buttons.

SEE: The main benefits of conversational IVRs 

Regularly reviewing and testing your IVR system is another way to improve call flow. IVR analytics can help you find areas that are causing confusion or delays. Monitoring call abandonment rates at various stages of the IVR menu can also help pinpoint problematic areas.

2. Ensure efficient caller authentication

Once past the IVR menu, the next critical step in the call flow process is authenticating a caller’s identity. This step is essential for security and privacy reasons, but it can become a significant bottleneck if not handled efficiently.

Authenticating callers efficiently without annoying them is all about striking the right balance between tight security and a smooth, frictionless experience.

Callers will get annoyed if the authentication process is overly complex or time-consuming. Aside from lower customer satisfaction, this can also leave you dealing with longer call times, making your call center less efficient.

So your goal with your authentication processes should be to:

• Reduce the time to reach resolution.
• Minimize frustration for both callers and agents.
• Ensure security without sacrificing service quality.

There are a few ways to do this:

• Biometric authentication: Utilizing biometric authentication methods, like voice recognition, can streamline the authentication process by quickly and securely verifying a caller’s identity without lengthy PINs or security questions.
• Use caller ID and Automatic Number Identification (ANI): You can pre-authenticate callers based on their phone number, which can be cross-referenced with customer records to expedite the authentication process and protect against caller ID spoofing.
• Security questions: If security questions are necessary, ensure they’re straightforward and not easily guessed by others. Limiting the number of questions asked can also help speed up the process.

Remember to regularly review and update your authentication processes to address new security threats while also considering caller feedback on the ease of use.

3. Optimize call routing

So far, your caller has navigated through your IVR menu and successfully passed your authentication process. The next big step in the call flow is call routing, where the customer is transferred to the appropriate destination.

Over time, customer inquiries change, you gain market share in new time zones, the call center reorganizes departments — whatever it is, the call routing has to get updated to reflect the change, but it doesn’t always happen.

SEE: Discover how call routing impacts your brand. 

Call flows can really suffer when calls are routed according to rules that no longer fit your business. Make sure that you are really routing calls efficiently. Especially with virtual call centers, are all possible agents who could help always capable of receiving the call?

Here are more considerations if you are trying to optimize call flow.

• Skill-based routing: Calls are directed to agents based on their specific skills or areas of expertise relevant to the caller’s needs. By matching caller needs with agent skills, call centers can improve first contact resolution rates and overall customer satisfaction.
• Priority routing: For call centers that deal with a wide range of customer inquiries, prioritizing calls based on urgency or customer value can help manage wait times and ensure critical issues are addressed promptly.
• Real-time monitoring and adjustment: You can monitor call volumes, wait times, and agent availability to make further adjustments to your routing strategies. For example, say you find you’re struggling with uneven workloads or burnout among agents. You could then use least-occupied agent routing, which distributes call loads among available agents evenly. This routing system identifies agents who’ve been idle for the longest time and then directs incoming calls to them, ensuring a more balanced workload and reducing customer wait times.

4. Incorporate feedback to call flows

Agents and customers are two great sources of feedback you can use to improve call flows, keeping them efficient, effective, and aligned with your customers’ changing needs.

To collect customer feedback, consider implementing post-call surveys. These are brief surveys at the end of calls which will give you immediate and relevant feedback from customers about their experience. Just make sure to keep them short and straight forward to encourage customers to participate.

These customer satisfaction survey templates and common survey questions are a good place to start getting data points on customer sentiment. Be sure to tweak the questions you use to spotlight call flow issues.

Agent debriefs can help you collect similar feedback from the employee side. Scheduling meetings with your agents to discuss their experiences and gather suggestions can give you valuable insights for improving the call flow process.

You can also use employee survey tools, which are less time-consuming for managers and reports than a meeting.

Whatever method you choose, identify call flow issues with questions like:

1. What frequent issues do callers face, and how can we adjust our call flow to address these more efficiently?
2. Which parts of our IVR system are the most confusing for callers, and what are your suggestions for simplifying them?
3. Are there script segments that consistently cause confusion or frustration for callers?
4. In your experience, where do calls get unnecessarily delayed, and what changes could speed up resolution?
5. What additional tools or training could empower you to resolve calls more effectively and improve overall caller satisfaction?

It’s crucial not just to collect feedback but to act on it. Implementing changes based on feedback shows your customers and agents that their input is valued and taken seriously. You can even inform customers and agents about the changes made in response to their feedback.

Common call flow mistakes

1. Failing to personalize the caller experience

Call centers sometimes miss the opportunity to use customer data to personalize the call experience. Personalization can drive loyalty and satisfaction. On the other end of the spectrum, a one-size-fits-all approach in call handling and IVR responses overlooks the chance to make customers feel valued and understood. You want to balance consistency with personalization.

If possible, the remedy is to start using customer data. Tailor IVR prompts and agent interactions based on the caller’s background and preferences. CRM integration can also provide real-time access to customer information and empower your agents to deliver a more personalized and efficient service.

For example, imagine a customer named Mary calls about a recurring billing issue. Upon calling, the IVR recognizes Mary’s phone number and prompts her with, “Hi Mary, thanks for calling about your [service name]. We see you’ve contacted us about billing before. Can you direct yourself to an agent specializing in billing issues?”

When Mary connects with an agent, the CRM integration automatically surfaces her account information and past billing inquiries. The agent greets Mary by name, acknowledges the past issue, and can quickly dive into resolving the current problem without needing Mary to repeat details.

2. Overly complex menu options

Overly complex phone menus are a recipe for disaster. Callers will get frustrated if they have to listen to seven or eight menu options to press the right number. It takes 30 seconds to read through all those options, and if the caller misses it the first time around, they won’t be happy to wait again.

The best way to avoid this is to be ruthless about keeping menu options below five per level. Even that will get exhausting for callers.

3. No live agent option

Customers facing complex issues or seeking a human touch can become frustrated by endless menus and a lack of clear options to reach a live agent. This can lead to feelings of alienation and a sense of being just another number in the system.

Deflecting calls with chatbots, queue callbacks, or visual IVR — these are all excellent ways to take heat off your agents during peak call times, but they are still deflecting calls. Some people really want to speak to an agent and get upset when they can’t.

SEE: Learn about five powerful use cases for visual IVR 

I know this isn’t always possible, but it is ideal to offer callers a clear and immediate option to connect with a live agent. Not everyone is going to take this option, but callers know when they are getting bounced around.

The solution lies in striking a balance. You don’t have to include the live agent option in every IVR menu. Analyze call patterns, identify areas where human intervention is frequently required, and adjust your IVR options accordingly.

Remember, a frustrated customer who can’t reach a human representative is more likely to abandon ship and take their business elsewhere.

4. Lack of proactive communication strategies

Call centers often become so focused on responding to issues that they neglect proactive communication strategies.

Imagine a customer receiving a surprise outage notification after they’ve lost internet access for an hour. Proactive communication, such as SMS alerts or social media updates, could have preempted the frustration not to mention the unnecessary extra call volume.

To break out of this reactive cycle, develop proactive communication channels like SMS alerts, email updates, and social media interactions. You can use these to inform customers about potential issues, updates, or changes before they reach a boiling point.

This demonstrates care and value upfront, with an added bonus of reducing call volumes and enhancing customer satisfaction.