Call routing
If you get lots of inbound calls, then you need a phone system that features phone call routing. Luckily, Dialpad's unified communications platform has just that—try it for free! Signup takes just a few minutes, and you'll be set up with a virtual phone number too.
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What is call routing?
Call routing is a call management feature (commonly found in telephony and contact center software) that automatically distributes incoming calls according to criteria that you’ve set based on your contact center's or team's capacity.
The benefits of call routing, if you do it right, are huge—especially if you run a small business or are understaffed or under-resourced. Traditionally, businesses needed to hire a person just to direct calls to the right team members or departments. That was their entire job.
Not anymore. Now, a good communications platform or phone system can automatically route calls for you, allowing you to provide an excellent customer experience with low call wait times—while making sure callers get to the most skilled agents for their particular questions.
Call routing with Dialpad
Sign up for any one of Dialpad's Talk plans to get a robust communications platform that comes with call routing, unlimited calling (within your country, the US, and Canada), call tracking, video meetings, and more—all in one app.
(Or, if you run a contact center, get a demo to see how call routing could work for you.)
Easy setup
From making changes to your call routing, to porting numbers or buying toll-free numbers, you can do it all in Dialpad through your online account.
Different types of call routing
With Dialpad, you can route to the agent who's been idle the longest, or according to a fixed order, or based on skill level—just to name a few options. You can even route to voicemail or other departments, and specify how long you want calls to ring for before defaulting to the hold queue!
Custom greetings
Upload or record a custom greeting to let callers know how they can route themselves to the right department. You can even upload custom voicemail greetings—all in your online account.
Fallback options
Any calls that go unanswered will be routed to your fallback option—you can set that to go directly to voicemail, to another department, or to an automated response menu.
Call routing rules by department
Set call routing rules for different departments. Once you’ve set your business hours for each department, you can tailor the call routing rules to how their agents are set up. For example, you may want to do direct routing for customers calling about basic renewals, but choose skill-based routing for customers calling about trickier things like cancelling their service or refunds.
Built-in analytics
Understand how your contact center is performing with analytics that show call volume patterns, average speed to answer, missed calls, call duration, and more. Dialpad even lets you track which IVR (Interactive Voice Response) options are being used most frequently so that you can continuously refine your IVR menu.
Multilingual greetings
If you've got customers with different language preferences, then you'll need a call routing system that supports that. Dialpad's IVR menu languages span English, Spanish, French, Japanese, German, and more.
Integrations with your favorite tools
Dialpad integrates with CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot to automatically log activities and calls, and lets you embed a CTI dialer right inside these tools too.
In-queue callback
A very important call management feature to have, in-queue callbacks are important for the customer experience because it gives your callers the option of hanging up and getting a call later. Hey, not everyone can wait around on hold all day.
Day-and-night coverage
Have customers and callers in different time zones? Dialpad's call routing features make sure to route calls to an available person in real time—no matter what time of day it is.
How do I set up call routing on a business phone system?
So, how does call routing work? It should be pretty easy to set up. Let’s use Dialpad as an example.
1. Log into your account or in your web browser on dialpad.com, then navigate to Admin Settings.
2. From there, go to Departments > Business Hours & Call Handling > Call Routing.
3. Choose Edit Call Routing. (You can customize this for your business hours, with one set of routing for your open hours and another for your closed hours.)
4. Here, you'll be able to route phone calls either to your "Operators" (or whoever on your team is responsible for taking calls) or to other options like voicemail, another department, or an automated voice response. That's it!