Now let's consider the advanced case we had discussed in previous sections:

• Incoming call checking holiday and opening hours
• IVR with three branches
• Time out if the call is not answered on time

Below you find an almost complete flow chart for this process (almost complete in so far as the time-out decision point does not lead back to the waiting queue in this graph as it would branch to all three blue boxes which would make it look very odd):

 

⇒ The first part: Checking if the service is open

• Are holidays true? If yes, go to the audio apologizing that the service is closed. If not, the call continues to the next decision point.
• Is the call reaching the line within office hours? If not, it goes to the same sorry prompt as in the case of holidays. If the service is open it goes to the next decision point.

⇒ The second part: The IVR

• The caller reaches a decision node: You can select 1 (Sales), 2 (Support), or 3 (Tech).
• Depending on the decision, the call will go to one of the three wait queues and will hear music while waiting.

⇒ The end of the call

• At any point, the call might be picked up. Then, after talking, it will end.
• Also, the duration of the call is checked in regular intervals. If it reaches the maximum wait time, the customer is forwarded to a sorry prompt, and the call ends.
• As long as both of the conditions above do not apply, the caller will stay in the queue and hear wait music.

 

Of course, this is only one way to draw this process. Sometimes, you might want to choose to draw scenarios and not the entire flow. For instance, see the flow below:

You could describe the above scenario in one sentence: "A caller reaches the hotline at a time when the service is open who wants to talk to Support but the call times out."

This is how you could create scenario-based flow charts, this is a list of all available scenarios:

1. Holidays
2. Out of business hours
3. Selects 1 - call times out
4. Selects 1 - call is bridged
5. Selects 2 - call times out
6. Selects 2 - call is bridged
7. Selects 3 - call times out
8. Selects 3 - call is bridged
9. The customer hangs up before selecting the call reason

So if you want to draw scenario-based call flows you would need to draw nine for the scenario discussed here and it might sometimes get tough to keep an overview. Therefore, we always recommend that you draw at least one abstract overview of the call flow even though it's much easier to read the scenario flows.

But so far, we only looked at the call flow. Let's investigate how you could map automation and integrations.