Best practices
Design call flows that respect the caller's time, always offer a person, and survive the calls that go wrong.
Respect the caller's time
- Greeting: one sentence. They rang with something in mind.
- Five options at most. By the sixth, the first is forgotten.
- The common case first. If most callers want order status, it is option 1.
- Never make them listen twice. A caller who mis-keys should hear "press 1, 2 or 0", not the entire menu again.
Always offer a person
Put a way to reach a human in the top menu and mean it. A caller who cannot find one starts pressing 0 repeatedly, then hangs up and calls back angrier.
If nobody is available, say so and offer a voicemail. Silence reads as being ignored. A Queue tells callers where they stand while they wait.
Write for the ear
- Put the digit where callers can act on it. "For balances, press 1" lets them decide as they listen. On Infobip, where keys pressed during a prompt are ignored, lead with the digit instead ("Press 1 for balances") and keep the prompt short.
- Read numbers as digits: "four two one nine", not "four thousand two hundred and nineteen".
- Confirm what you captured before acting on it.
- Fill silence: "One moment while I check that."
Design for the bad path
Real calls hit muted handles constantly: noisy markets, pockets, poor signal, agents already on a call. Wire every one of them.
The most common cause of a flow that "feels broken" is an unwired no input handle. The caller
says nothing, the retry limit passes, and the call ends with no explanation.
Keep mid-call work fast
The caller is on the line while an API call runs. Keep it to a couple of seconds, and always wire the failure path: an API that times out must not leave them in silence.
Protect what callers tell you
- Keypad input is often a PIN or an account number. Transcripts redact long digit runs automatically; do not defeat that by speaking captured values back in prompts you do not need.
- Use Verify Caller before anything account-specific.
- Recordings and transcripts are personal data. Keep only what you need, and say you are recording if your jurisdiction requires it.
Test with your voice, not your eyes
Read every prompt aloud at the speed the engine will say it. Sentences that read cleanly are often too long to hear, and abbreviations that look obvious are unpronounceable.
Then call the number from a real handset on a real network. Latency and audio quality on a mobile connection are not what your desk hears.
Outbound: earn the call
- Say who is calling in the first sentence.
- Call at reasonable hours, in the recipient's timezone.
- Handle voicemail deliberately: leave a short message or hang up, but do not read a menu to a machine.
- Honour opt-outs immediately.