Call Routing: How to Send Every Call to the Right Person

The routing rules worth knowing

There are many routing options. Most businesses use a handful of them. These are the ones that matter.

Route by menu choice

The caller picks an option, such as 1 for sales or 2 for support, and the call goes to that team. This is the most common setup. It works because the caller does the sorting for you.

Route by time of day

During office hours, calls ring the team. Outside them, calls go to a voicemail, an on-call person, or a different office that is still open. This is the rule that stops after-hours calls from vanishing.

Ring a group

Instead of one person, the call rings a whole team, either all at once or one after another. If nobody answers, it moves on to a backup. A group means a single sick day does not leave a number dead.

Route to the account owner

If you know the caller, the call can go to the person who looks after that customer. This only works when the phone system knows your customer records, which is one reason the phone and the CRM belong close together.

Where an IVR menu fits

An IVR, short for interactive voice response, is the automated menu a caller hears first. "Press 1 for sales, press 2 for support." It is just one routing tool. It collects an answer from the caller, and your rules do the rest.

An IVR helps when you have clearly different reasons for calling and different teams to handle them. It hurts when it stands between a customer and a simple answer. If nine out of ten callers want the same thing, skip the menu and send them straight there.

• Keep it to one level. Two levels is the limit. Three and people hang up.
• Keep it to four options or fewer. Callers forget the rest.
• Put the most common reason first. Do not make people wait through options they do not need.
• Always offer a way to reach a person. A menu with no exit is the fastest way to lose a customer.

How to set it up

You do not need a long project for this. A morning is usually enough, if you plan before you click anything.

1. List why people call. Look at the last month. Sales questions, support problems, invoices, suppliers. Group them into three or four reasons.
2. Name an owner for each reason. A team or group, not one person, so absences do not break it.
3. Draw the path on paper. Caller dials, hears the greeting, picks an option, reaches a group. Add what happens if nobody answers.
4. Add the time rules. Set office hours, after-hours handling and holidays.
5. Write a short greeting. Say who they have reached and the options. Under ten seconds is plenty.
6. Test it as a customer. Call from a mobile you do not normally use. Try every option. Ask a colleague to call at night.

Review the setup once a quarter. Teams change, and routing that was right in January can be wrong by June. If you are also choosing a number to put in front of all this, our guide to a virtual phone number for business explains how the number and the routing work together.

Mistakes that annoy callers

Most routing complaints come from the same few mistakes.

• Long greetings. Nobody wants a thirty-second speech before they can speak to anyone.
• Menus that mirror your org chart. Callers do not know your departments. Name the options after their problem, not your structure.
• No fallback. If the only person assigned is out, the call should go somewhere, not ring until it drops.
• Never testing from outside. The setup looks fine from the admin screen and breaks on a real phone.
• Forgetting the record afterwards. If nobody logs the call, the next person starts from nothing. See our notes on call recording software for what to keep.

For the wider picture of what a company phone setup should cover, start with our overview of a business phone system.

Where WeldCall fits

WeldCall is the cloud phone in WeldSuite. It includes call routing and a call menu (IVR), so you can build the setup described above without a separate phone vendor. You get a dialpad, click-to-call from your contacts, and you can receive calls on any device. You can also port a number you already own. Calls are encrypted, with access controls per team.

Every call gets a recording, a transcript and notes filed to the right contact. That gives your routing a memory: the person who picks up next time can see what was said last time, because the call sits with the customer in WeldCRM.

WeldCall is one of twelve apps included in every WeldSuite tier. WeldSuite is a complete software suite for mid-market and enterprise teams, priced per user per month. Business is $49 a month, or $42 per user per month billed annually. Scale is $69 a month, or $59 per user per month annually. Enterprise is custom, with SSO, SAML, data residency and a 99.999% uptime SLA.

Sources

1. Wikipedia: Interactive voice response https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_voice_response
2. Wikipedia: Automatic call distributor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_call_distributor

Frequently asked questions

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