Plan carefully!

Absolutely nothing is more important than careful planning when designing and setting up caller applications for your system. The following are several techniques you can use to help plan your system’s use of caller applications:

List the desired behaviors for your system.

Exactly what do you want your system to do and how you want it to behave? What do you want callers who reach your system to experience? What kinds of choices do you want to give them, and at what level? How many menu levels do you want to offer?

Make a flow chart or diagram of the caller application(s).

One of the best ways to plan your system’s behavior is to visualize it by creating a flow chart or diagram. This enables you to trace the caller experience and all possible options. It also helps you determine where you will and will not need to record and use prompts. For examples of call flow charts, see More on caller applications.

Plan your prompts.

Create a chart or spreadsheet to list and describe the prompts you think you will need.

Note: Only one prompt can be assigned to a given node. This means that, if you have a node in which you want to make several menu options available to callers, you must include the information for all those options in a single prompt to be assigned to that node.

You can always add to your list of prompts later if and as the caller application design changes, but it is good to try to list as many in advance of the actual execution of the plan as possible. Make sure you leave a place to assign an ID number to each prompt, either now or later.

Once you have planned your system’s operation, the next step is to Set up your targets.