Call flow management influences the efficiency of service delivery through the voice portal of an inbound contact center. Interactive Voice Responses (IVR) are an important sub-set that open up opportunity for self-service and automation within an multi-channel contact center center operation. A visual call flow designer is a graphical tool to build work-flows for interaction with the caller, perform automated tasks, make decisions on branching based on customer input, and dictate the routing. A sophisticated contact center software will include a call flow building tool with a web Graphical User Interface (GUI) designer capable of drag and drop flow management with revision control.
Call flows within an IVR can be complex, handling detailed customer interactions driven by the organization’s business processes. A powerful visual call flow designer will simplify the task of building, testing, and managing these call flow interactions. Both the IVR functions and the contact center ACD functions should be available from the call flow designer GUI to allow the integration of the IVR capability with call routing functions. Call routing decisions assist in directing the right traffic to queues where skills based employees can better handle the calls with greater efficiency.
The biggest advantage of a GUI driven visual call flow designer is in empowering the contact center management staff to develop, change and manage call-flows, IVR, and dialplans, without the assistance of a programming staff. Based on visual representations, a call flow designer will allow incorporating capabilities like database interactions, along with mundane tasks like playing audio prompts, collecting responses, and directing calls into queues with the right priority.
Modern dialplan builders with visual call-flow designers unleash the full functionality of a call center software and the underlying Asterisk telephony, by providing a dynamic visual modeling tool for designing the IVR applications. A multi-tenant deployment requires a scalable contact center solution employing a cluster of Asterisk servers controlled by a powerful contact center ACD. A visual call flow design tool with revision control is critical for self-service IVR management in a multi-tenant Cloud offering.