Appointment Reminder
The Appointment Reminder enables you to contact your customers and remind them of their previously scheduled appointments.
Use the appointment reminder to speed up the process of communication with your customers by eliminating the step of having them talk to an agent first.
Your customers may confirm or decline appointments by entering digits on their phone’s keypad. You can also provide your customers with the option to talk to an agent right away and schedule a new appointment.
Introducing this solution can help you automate your business processes and increase efficiency.
IMPLEMENTATION STEPS
Steps over Web Interface
1. Log in to the Infobip web interface, navigate to the Moments module, click CREATE FLOW, and then click Start from Scratch.
2. Select a One-time audience then click START BUILDING.
3. Enter a Flow Name (e.g., Appointment Reminder).
4. On the side panel of the one-time audience entry point, select the audience you want to send your call to. Your audience should be selected from the People module. You can choose from previously created tags (e.g., appointment), by name, and more.
5. After you’ve selected your audience, you can Start building IVR flow. The first IVR element you have to choose for outbound IVR calls is Start Call.
6. In the Start Call side panel, enter or select a sender. This is your caller ID which will be displayed on your customer's phone once they receive a call.
INFO
Bear in mind that Voice can only use numeric senders, and delivery of the entered sender depends on the CLI route being supported. What this means is that we are not sure that the voice connection we use is able to deliver the caller ID as defined. Sometimes operators will manipulate the CallerID to some other value.
7. Click Arrow Icon and select Play from the available elements.
8. When you click Play, a side panel will open on the right side where you can fill in the required parameters.
Choose an audio source:
- Text-to-Speech – enter the message you want to be played to your customers
- Audio file – use pre-recorded audio files from your computer (File Upload) or the URL location of your audio file (File URL).
- Your customers will first hear your text-to-speech or pre-recorded audio file message when they answer your call. Make sure to explain all the keypad options in your voice message.
In this example, we will use the text-to-speech option. The message text can be entered in the Content field found in the side panel.
9. Next, you should collect customer inputs. To do this, click the arrow icon and select Collect from the available elements.
When you click Collect, a side panel will open on the right where you can fill in the required parameters:
- Name of variable (mandatory field).
- Maximum input length (optional parameter) – how many digits can your customer enter using their phone keypad.
- Waiting period for the response (optional parameter) – how much time does the customer has to enter these digits.
10. To be able to branch the call based on customer inputs, you need to enter the appropriate conditions.
To do this, click Create Conditions in the side panel and define all the expected values.
Keep in mind that the expected values should be correlated to the options offered in the audio menu prepared during Step 8 of this tutorial.
11. In this example, a customer who selects 1 on their keypad is confirming the appointment, a customer who selects 2 is declining the appointment, and a customer who selects 3 will be forwarded to your business phone number.
- All customers who did not select any of the above options might be asked to try again.
- To be able to track which customers confirmed or canceled the appointment, you can use the Add Tag action. You can also choose to review these customers later using the People module section of the portal.
- Once you’ve tagged these customers, you can choose to play them a new message. To do this, choose your next action on each of the available conditions by using the arrow icon after each condition. For digits 1 or 2, use the Add Tag element and for input 3 use the Forward Call action.
12. In the Forward call side panel, fill in the required parameters:
- From – caller ID to be displayed to the customer receiving the call
- To – number to forward the call to.
12. Click VALIDATE.
INFO
The flow will not be launched yet.
13. Click LAUNCH NOW.
INFO
If you do not see the summary or Launch Now button, check that you’ve set up each part of the Flow correctly.
This is what your final flow should look like:
Once you’ve completed all these steps, you can return to the main Flow page and watch the progress of your campaign.
PRO TIP
Check the availability of the person receiving the forwarded call. Use the Call API action to reach your backend and based on the response, proceed with forwarding the call if the person is available. Otherwise, you can click Play audio and then repeat Call API action to check availability again.