Ever had such a good customer service experience that you felt like the company genuinely appreciated you as a customer?

Such call flows are seldom a mistake. More often than not, they’re carefully designed to make sure your confidence in the business relationship increases.

Luckily, these kinds of call flows are not reserved for the high-budget contact centers of fortune 500 companies. Small businesses can use smart routing to create engaging scenarios for every customer.

In this post, we’ll go through 4 techniques that make each customer engagement session a pleasure for both the customer and your agents.

1. Conversational IVR call flows
2. Intelligent routing
3. Chatbots and AI
4. Integrated SMS

Let’s discuss how you can put any of these ideas into practice at your contact center.

Conversational IVR

Unless you’re purposely built out to be a 24-hour service call contact center, there is no guarantee that an incoming call will be answered by an agent.

This is where conversational IVR comes in handy.

Calls are answered at any time of day … only now a computerized response system handles the conversation.

It’s true that consumers have had bad experiences with old school IVR systems that had winding menus and irrelevant options. But the current generation of conversation systems are far more popular for both call routing and answering queries.

Intelligent routing

If, like most companies, you use a call center CRM to keep tabs on client account activities, you’re a step closer to using caller history when creating call flows. A typical CRM stores data like the reason for a customer’s previous calls and their lifetime customer value.

This data can help you to direct customers towards the right resource first time based on factors like their preferred language or the nature of their enquiry.

Here’s another good example: if a customer calls to check on an outstanding issue you can use that CRM data to route them to the exact person they spoke to before.

Chatbots and AI

Customers want two things: a good resolution and a fast resolution.

Contact centers can offer that – but the catch is, it’s not cheap.

Or at least… that was the catch.

But now a lot of automated tech is bringing down the cost at an unprecedented rate. Tools like chatbots can generally handle between 5-25% of the total queries that come into a contact center.

Hang on though – chatbots aren’t part of a call flow, are they? Well, yes and no. Businesses are increasingly aware of the omnichannel way customers use their services. While some queries are handled 100% in automation, more still use automation as a convenient first step.

Chatbots are part of a call flow because they play a major role in the early stages of many calls. That’s why it’s so important to integrate your contact center services, ensuring that data customers provide to a chatbot follows them through any other channels.

SMS integration

Security-first platforms often require authentication from callers before discussing sensitive account details. Adding SMS into the call flow is a good way of upholding customer satisfaction while limiting the length of the conversation.

So what great about SMS?

• It’s everywhere. Unlike other messaging services, you can almost guarantee your customers have access to SMS.
• It’s widely trusted. Customers have had two decades to get used to SMS.
• It’s cheap. Sure, there’s a per-message cost… but each message drastically reduces the length of a call. (And calls cost far more!)

That’s not to say that SMS is the right solution for every interaction. Like everything on this list, it works as one part of the large and complex system within your contact.

Just remember; that complexity should only be obvious to you. For your customers the goal is always simplicity!