Best Business Phone Tree Templates

As an enterprise owner, no matter big or small, it’s commonly expected to expand enterprise-scale and increase enterprise influence? If you have already dreamed about that, you should take action from now on, and the first action you need to do is undoubtedly to create a business phone tree.

What is a Business Phone Tree?

Before getting knowledge about a business phone number, it is better for you to learn something about the phone tree. Phone trees, otherwise known as interactive voice response (IVR) systems, help incoming callers interact with contact centers or call centers via automated greetings that route calls to available agents. This communication template is ideal for directing callers to relevant information efficiently (with minimal human intervention on your end).

Right now, it may be not hard for you to know that a business phone tree is a kind of phone tree related to business, with which enterprises can offer the best services to their customers. If you still have no idea about that, here comes an example: you must have heard such voicemail like “Press one for sales, two for customer support, and three for all other queries.” or even: “please clearly speak the name of the department you wish to speak to after the tone.” You may be very familiar with such a reply, which is especially true as you call a big company, and it usually happens when dialing an enterprise for consulting service or the logistics and tracking of invoices.

In one word, such a reply like the above is the main content of a business phone tree.

Why is a Business Phone Tree So Important for Business Growth?

It can say with full certainty that almost everyone has experienced such a reply when dialing an enterprise every time. Here comes the question, why is a business phone tree used by almost every enterprise, in other words, why is a business phone tree so important for enterprises? The reasons are following:

It is the key to stimulating business growth.

A good and instant service is a key for enterprises to win customers’ trust, and a business phone tree is a useful tool to offer customers such a service by replying to their calling manually or automatically at once. Because customers’ trust is bound with business growth, it is not hard to understand a business phone tree can boost business growth.

It is helpful for cutting down the cost of enterprises.

Several telephone operators are needed to reply to incoming calls, and it will surely cost enterprises a lot to hire and pay these workers. After all, it’s human resources that cost the most, and they fail to be on service 24/7. However, enterprises can cut down their costs to the greatest extent with the help of intelligent voice assistants provided by a business phone tree.

It is helpful for increasing workers’ efficiency.

Sometimes, an employee’s most part of the time is wasted in clarifying what kind of help a caller is looking for as the call gets through, but with a business phone tree, all these troubles will be removed at once because one of the main functions of a business phone tree is to divide an enterprise’s business into different parts. As a result, when a customer calls to look for help, the intelligent voice system of a phone tree will inquire the caller what kind of help he/she wants and automatically reroute the call to the appropriate department.

How to Set Up a Business Phone Tree?

Some of you may hold such a suspicion that now that a business phone tree is so powerful, it must be very difficult to set up one. To be honest, it is not difficult but even easy to acquire one with EasyLine used, and what you should do is to follow the following steps.

Step 1. Create a Diagram

What exactly is a diagram? In fact, you can imagine it as automatic intelligent voice guidance. The specific operating process is when receiving an incoming call, the intelligent voice assistant will thank for the caller’s calling at first, inquire which kind of language service he/she wants secondly, then learn about the relative help looked for by asking the caller to click the relative numbers according to the voice prompt. Lastly, the system will transfer the call to the relative apartment automatically, and the worker will listen to and cope up with the caller’s puzzle. If you have some idea about diagrams but still fail to know what content you need to put into a diagram, here is an example for you to take into consideration.

  • Main Greeting

This part thanks for the caller’s calling firstly and gives the caller basic information about your company.

  • Language Options

Immediately following the main greeting are your menu’s language options. This helps non-English speakers navigate to the sub-menu that best matches their native language.

  • General Information & Announcements

This section serves as an initial type of self-service call routing menu where the caller can gather information without needing to be routed to an agent. In addition to general information, leaving announcements, special offers, or standard or holiday hours is often done here.

  • Call Groups

This is a grouping of your business departments, and you need to include every potential option for your callers. For example, this sub-menu can prompt the caller to dial “1” for your Customer Service department, “2” for your Sales department, or “3” to reach Billing.

  • Dial-by-Name Directory

This choice is prepared for those customers who have an existing business relationship with a specific agent by offering a dial-by-name directory. That is to say, with a period time of cooperation, the customer may have already known what kind of help they are looking for, and which phone number they should dial, thus, it is unnecessary for them to take actions according to the guidance of intelligent voice assistant for saving time. With this choice, a customer can acquire help in the shortest possible time.

Step 2. Assign Call Groups

Once your diagram is completed, it’s time to classify your employees so that they are reachable via each of their respective departments. When you set up a phone tree, it’s a good idea to list all the names and extensions of employees who fall within a specific call group.

Step 3. Configure Phone Tree Settings in the IVR Menu

Now that you’ve done the preliminary steps, it’s time to move forward to the actual process of configuring your phone tree’s IVR menus. This process is actually to convert the ideal drawing into an effective operating framework. This framework is to ensure an incoming call pass from one step to the next successfully.

Step 4. Set Hours for Your Phone Tree Menus

In most cases, your IVR system will most likely have a 24/7 operational time by default. But it still fails to deal with all incoming calls, because the last step of a business phone tree is to transfer a call into the relative department so that workers will answer the phone and solve problems. However, supposing that the day is a weekend or holiday, who will answer the incoming calls? The answer is nobody. So in order to solve this dilemma, it is recommended for you to set a second phone number tree used for different working schedules or clarify business hours or forward calls tonight shift customer service staff. This demand can also be satisfied by EasyLine.

5 Phone Tree Templates for Small Businesses

If you do not know what kind of business phone trees suit your enterprise well, even do not know what kind of business phone trees have nowadays, you can directly use the following phone tree templates without effort. However, the fact is business phone tree varies from enterprise to enterprise, that is to say, you can use these templates, but it is better for you to customize the most suitable one for your enterprise or customers according to the business services of your enterprise.

Basic Phone Tree

As its name suggests, this template is an all-purpose, generic outline that can be used for pretty much any kind of business phone service setup that you may have. You can start with this blank phone tree template as a base and build it out based on whatever unique departments or extensions you may have in your office. This tree is designed to be as simple and easy as possible.

business phone tree

Sales Phone Tree

If you mostly use your phone system for sales purposes, you probably want to get callers in touch with a sales agent as soon as possible. As such, this template switches out the sales and company business hours options on the menu. While this change may seem small, it can make a big difference in getting your sales agents to speak to potential customers.

Aggressive Sales Phone Tree

Introductory massages are usually kept short, and the menu serves the purpose of leading off with the option to be redirected to your sales team. In this example, the voice menu could lead with something like “Thank you for calling (company name). To get your customized service quote today, press 0 to connect with a customer success manager.”

Multi-location Phone Tree

This phone tree is somewhat self-explanatory. If your team is spread across different physical offices, you will want to help users reach the office most relevant. For example, a customer who has recently visited your Newark, New Jersey, office would most likely want to speak with the team in that office as opposed to the staff in your Philadelphia location.

Emergency Phone Tree

Emergency phone trees are distinct from other types of trees because they are for companies to make outgoing calls rather than take in call traffic. These are useful because they can let large groups of people know about emergency closures and altered hours of operation without your staff having to make the call themselves. These trees are popular among school districts and municipalities but can be used by businesses of all kinds.

Bottom Line

  • A business phone tree is a kind of automatic voice reply system used by enterprises for business services, and it helps a lot especially for business growth.
  • A business phone tree can be created easily according to the above steps.
  • The above five types of business phone trees can be your references, but you are suggested to create a phone tree by yourself according to the main business prompt of your enterprise.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *