The Call Flow Designer allows you to set up different phone trees to route and manage calls efficiently. There are many options on how you might configure your phone numbers.
This guide contains information on the following topics:
How to locate and edit/configure your individual phone numbers
How to design a call flow
A guide to the different available call flow actions
Inserting a new step in an already configured call flow
Deleting steps from call flows
Examples of call flows including information on failovers
Further related reading- links to other useful articles
To find out which features belong to each plan, refer to our Pricing page.
Intelligent call routing based on your customised pre-defined rules can be configured in the CloudTalk Dashboard. You may design different call flows for each phone number.
This video will describe all that you need to know in regards to our Call Flow Designer. For further details in written and picture form, please continue reading.
Configuring your individual phone numbers
Intelligent call routing based on your customized pre-defined rules can be configured in the CloudTalk Dashboard. You can design different call flows for each phone number.
Access the menu and go to Numbers in CloudTalk Dashboard. A list of all your phone numbers will appear. You can configure each phone number individually by clicking on the blue pencil icon.
Phone number settings
First, click on the icon “⚙️”, then on the phone number. In this step, if needed, you can enable/disable the call recording and mandatory call tagging, configure business hours or international calls. Otherwise, these settings will behave the way they were set by default.
Number settings in detail:
Business Hours: You can configure business hours for each phone number. Find more information in our dedicated article on Business hours.
International Calls: You may create limitations for international calls. Your agents will be able to make phone calls only to countries which you have selected. For security reasons, we recommend enabling only those countries that are really necessary.
Important notice: This step will overwrite your company settings regarding International Calls for this specific number.
Pro Tip: Choose internal labels
You can give a personalised name to each of your phone numbers. Labels will help you easily identify phone numbers in the interface. Labels are also displayed in statistics, reports, inbound calls, etc.
Design your call flow
By clicking on the icon “+”, you have an opportunity to insert different steps into your Call Flow.
Call flow actions:
Call to agent – all calls are routed to a single agent. Find out how to add new agents here.
Call to preferred/favorite agent - when the specific contact in the contact list is associated with the preferred agent, this contact will be automatically routed to the preferred agent. If no preferred agent is set for the specific contact, this step will be skipped.
Call to group – calls are automatically routed to a selected group of agents from the list. For more information on creating a group, click here.
Playback - you can choose a predefined message from the list to be played to each caller at any time (by insert “Playback”). For more information on how to create customised messages, click here.
Voicemail - as we previously mentioned, you are also able to route the call to voicemail. In this step, you can select which group or agent should receive the voicemail.
Furthermore, you can decide whether you want the voicemail to be sent to the agent's email and if a voicemail recording should be attached. Messages cannot be assigned to this step, so you will need a Playback step directly before the Voicemail step in order for the caller to hear the voicemail recording before leaving their message.
Note: Choosing "Yes" to sending voicemail to the agent's email
address will send an email to ALL agents in a group when a
group is selected.
Redirect to external number - if you wish (e.g. for business-critical lines), you can redirect the call to an external number outside of CloudTalk. Once a call is redirected, it is now considered an outbound call and will be charged via the outbound rates. These outbound minutes will not be counted as call packages that are assigned to specific agents.
Call recording - let's say that you just want to record a specific part/branch of the call flow. To do this, you need to insert the option Call recording. If you skip this step, the call recording will remain as according to general settings rule.
Fax – select this option if you need to use a fax machine. The phone number will be immediately ready to receive fax messages. Define an email address where all fax messages will be automatically sent.
Important notice: This step can’t be combined with any other steps.
Conference room – you can assign a phone number to a conference room, so that the conference room can be reached from public phone numbers. To find out how to create a new conference room, click here.
Important notice: This step also can’t be combined with other steps.
Change of the outbound caller name - before forwarding the call to an External Number, you can decide to change the Outbound Caller ID. CloudTalk uses the caller's number as Outbound Caller ID by default. This can be changed to a CloudTalk number (so that you know the call is being forwarded from CloudTalk, note that you'll lose the information about the original caller's number in this setup).
HTTP Request - allows the delivery of HTTP Requests once this step is reached. For more detailed information on HTTP Requests, check out our dedicated guide here.
Collect input - used to enable the input of data during incoming calls. The action consists of pattern which defines what it the expected format of the input (can be a constant value used as password or REGEX) and confirm character. The result of input can be referenced within the Map function of other actions. Refer to our dedicated Collect Input guide here.
Get and dial an extension - extension numbers allow larger companies to connect callers to dozens of different departments or employees.
Important notice: callers need to know the extension number agent/group they wish to reach. This step can have a recording assigned directly to it.
IVR - IVR allows you to guide the caller through different options and make sure they are always directed to the right department or agent.
Time router - you can also set custom paths of a call flow, based on time and day. This step is very similar to IVR, just instead of setting each call to be routed by key-pressing, you define branches based on times and days (Monday - Sunday / Holidays). There is also a failover option which covers all the time that hasn't already been specified.
Go to - if you have multiple numbers that require the same call flow, only one number will require to have it built in and others can use the "Go To" step instead.
Condition splitter: use this action in order to split your Call flow based on the details related to call, contact, or HTTP requests response object. Condition Splitter uses AND as an operator with multiple conditions.
Mark call as resolved: have the call automatically marked as resolved in your CloudTalk system if the desired outcome is reached.
How do I insert a step in the middle of my call flow?
Have you already created a specific call flow (i.e. multi-level IVR) and once you finished, you realised that you forgot to insert a specific step (i.e. welcome message)? There is no need to delete the whole call flow and start over again. Follow these steps:
Press the button “+” in the step before the place where you want to insert the new step.
2. Select the option you want to insert.
How do I delete a step in my call flow?
Go to the settings of the specific step (click on the icon “⚙️”)
2. Click on the “🗑️” icon
3. When deleting actions in a call flow, you can either choose to delete only this step or all subsequent actions.
Important notice: If you delete an IVR or time router from your call flow, the system deletes all the subsequent actions, because they all are associated with this step.
Setting up the call flow designer- examples
Now that you have a basic grasp of how the designer works, let's look at some traditional routing practices.
The main aim of the Call Flow Designer is to avoid missed calls and to ensure your customers get to the right agents at the first time of asking. Let's look at some typical examples we've set up in a test account:
Example 1: In this simplistic example, the caller listens to a welcome message and then calls to the Agents group. If no one from this group answers, the caller is redirected to voicemail.
Example 2: In this more advanced example, the caller first hears our standard business welcome message, followed by an IVR, which will redirect them either to our Group A or Group B call group, depending on the customers choice and the issue they're having. These could be groups such as 'Sales' or 'Support' depending on how you configure them. In our example, the caller can also press '3' to leave a voicemail for the Billing team, and if no agent is available after the caller chooses either of the other options (1 or 2), they will also be redirected to voicemail there.
Remember, when inserting an IVR, you'll probably want to record a message for your customers explaining the configured number choices to help them choose the correct department.
Note- You can also mark a particular branch of an IVR as a 'failover', see the picture below. This means if your customers forget to pick an option for any reason, they'll be redirected to the outcome you've marked.
Further related reading:
If you have any further questions regarding Call Flow Designer or any other topic, please reach out to our support team, we are always happy to help!