For years, we have seen with our customers that a perfectly designed routing of calls leads to greater satisfaction among callers and employees, more calls and more turnover.

American consultants J.D. Power published a study which showed that about 30% of the total customer experience with any organization is gained during the routing of telephone calls.

A good reason to take a look at the most common mistakes that are made when setting up a widely used solution for routing calls: the selection menu.

Of course, we also immediately indicate how you can prevent or solve these mistakes for your telephone number.

1. Too much information

A first impulse for many new customers is to include literally all departments and employees of the organization in the selection menu. The result is often a menu that is so complicated that the caller can no longer see the wood for the trees.

The result is that callers hang up or end up at the wrong department and still have to be transferred manually.

How do you prevent this?

Your selection menu is the starting point of the contact between customer and organization and should therefore not contain more than the most necessary.

You will therefore have to make a list of the most common questions. The best way to find out what these questions and needs are is to record calls and then inventory them.

Based on the list of most common questions that you compile in this way, you can quickly determine the options you need and thus their order in the menu.

The ideal selection menu offers a suitable option for 80% of the most common questions with as few options as possible.

Once you have done this, do not turn off call recording! When you regularly listen back to calls on a random basis, you will quickly see whether the menu needs to be adapted to changing questions or needs of your callers.

2. Incorrect or unusable information

Depending on where your caller is in what is called the customer journey, a caller has varying and often even predictably different questions.

For example, there is a good chance that someone who calls an airline in the weeks before the departure of a flight he or she has booked wants to change the booking or is looking for specific information about this flight.

More generally, an existing contact of your organization will have different questions and call for different reasons than someone who is not yet a customer and is calling for the first time.

This is often responded to by having customers enter a customer number at the beginning of the call, for example.

Although this works reasonably well, not everyone always has that number at hand. Sometimes those numbers are also too long and too awkward to enter. A considerable number of callers in such a situation still have to make a choice themselves or be transferred by one of the employees.

How do you solve this?

A better way to respond to this, which requires no action from the caller, is to have us make a link between the routing of your telephone number and your CRM system. If the caller’s telephone number appears in your CRM, we will route the call differently than when the number does not appear in it. We can even respond to data such as last contact person or purchase history.

If you want to know more about these possibilities, please feel free to contact us!

3. No self-service

No matter how well your selection menu is set up, nothing is more frustrating than a menu that lacks the option to speak to an employee directly.

Remember that 80% we talked about earlier? So we have not covered 20% of our callers’ questions with the options we have come up with. Those callers can choose this option.

The solution

Therefore, always offer an option to speak to an employee directly, even in the first menu.

By regularly listening back to the incoming calls that are delivered via this option, you can further optimize your selection menu.

Keep the selection menu optimized

Setting up a perfect selection menu is never a one-time task. The organization is subject to change, the questions and needs of customers change, and so you will notice that you will have to make a change in the selection menu or routing from time to time.

You can do a lot yourself within the online dashboard. You can of course also always contact one of us!

Extra tip: always add a queue, and a voice2email or call-back option.