Call routing that does not annoy your customers
Most IVR menus are built for the org chart, not the caller. A short guide to designing a flow people get through without swearing at the keypad.
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Key takeaways
- Label IVR options by the caller problem, not by your internal department names.
- Keep the top level to three choices; more than that and callers drop out.
- Decide explicitly what happens outside business hours before going live.
- Call your own line from an unrecognised phone each quarter and time the route to a human.
Summarised from the article below. Always worth reading the full piece for the caveats.
Or dig into it with
ChatGPT
Claude
Perplexity
Grok
GeminiThree options, one level deep
Every extra branch loses people. If you cannot express the routing in three choices at the top level, the problem is usually that two of your teams should share a queue. Reserve a second level for genuinely distinct journeys, and always leave a path to a human.
Business hours are part of the flow
The worst caller experience is a phone that rings out at 17:01. Set explicit hours per queue, and decide what happens outside them before you go live: voicemail with a callback promise, an overflow to another region, or a mobile for genuine emergencies. Any of those beats silence.
Test it as a stranger
Call your own line from a phone the system does not recognise and time how long it takes to reach a person. If it is over forty seconds, cut a branch. Do this again every quarter, because flows accumulate options the way garages accumulate boxes.
Put this into practice in an afternoon
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Written by
Elena RossiHead of Customer Operations
Elena runs the support floor at Votelly and has spent eleven years building contact centre operations across retail and healthcare. She writes about routing, staffing and the metrics that actually change behaviour.
Discussion1
- ABAna BeltranSupport Lead, Corva· 5 days ago
The "test it as a stranger" advice is underrated. We timed ours at 71 seconds to a human and nobody had noticed because we all dial internal extensions.
Reply
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