How to route your phone calls to many different call centers using lookup tables

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In many cases, each Invoca Campaign only routes phone calls to one destination phone number, or call center. However, you can also use Invoca to route your phone calls to many different call centers using a single campaign. With fewer campaigns in your Invoca account, this makes it much easier to set up and manage your campaigns.

There are several different methods you can use to route your Invoca phone calls to different destination phone numbers, including simple routing using the call treatment for your Invoca campaign or capturing the phone numbers on your landing pages. This article will focus on a third method: routing your phone calls dynamically based on conditions you can set in a predetermined list, such as a spreadsheet.
 
Here are a few situations you might choose to use this feature:
 

• Your business is a large enterprise with many different local branches that operate independently, such as in insurance, healthcare, automotive, and more.
• All of your destination call centers are known phone numbers that do not change frequently, or that you update frequently in a spreadsheet or store in another system, such as your CRM.  
• You want to use attributes of your callers, such as location data or customer type, to route phone calls.
• You want to use two or more factors — such as a combination of the product your caller is interested in and their location — to route phone calls.

Before you get started:
In order to route your Invoca phone calls to many different call centers, you must first designate one “overflow” call center that is capable of fielding calls intended for any of your destination call centers. This ensures that, in the event of an error or overflow phone calls, your business will still be able to respond to every caller.

 
Ready to start setting up your dynamic call routing? Follow these steps:
 

Section 1: Create and populate your routing table

The first step is to set up your Invoca account to store your call center phone numbers, as well as the conditions you’d like to use to route to those call centers. Then, we'll connect those routing conditions to the phone numbers you want them to lead to.
 

1. Log in to your Invoca account. In the sidebar menu, click Settings. Then, in the Network section, select Marketing Data.
2. Create a custom Marketing Data field for storing your destination call center phone numbers. Choose the marketing data field type “Short text”. For the Partner (API) name of your marketing data field, we recommend a name like “destination_phone_number”.
    
   Note:
   Make sure that this field doesn’t share a name with any data that you will collect dynamically on your landing pages.
    
3. Click Settings, then select Marketing Data again. Click the Tables tab, then click + Create New Table.
4. In the Table Name text box, enter a name for your call routing information.
5. Click the Lookup Field drop-down menu and select the information you’d like to use to determine your destination phone number. Note that this may be another marketing data field you'd need to create.
6. For more complex phone call routing, you may click +Add to include a secondary condition for routing your phone calls. For example, if you’d like to route callers to your destination call center based on both the customer’s caller ID and their ZIP code, select the Invoca Data field for “Caller ID” in your primary lookup field and your marketing data field for “zip_code” in your secondary lookup field. 
7. When you are finished setting your routing conditions, click Save.
8. Click Download Template to download a spreadsheet file (.xlsx format) containing the formatting and instructions to help you fill out your routing logic. Then, open the template spreadsheet you just downloaded.
9. In row 16 your template spreadsheet, you should see one column for each routing condition and marketing data field in your Invoca account. Find the column in your template spreadsheet corresponding to the routing condition you chose in step 5 of this guide. Enter each result you’d expect for that routing condition in into that column in the rows below. For example, if you’re routing phone calls based on the caller’s ZIP code, you can paste a list of the ZIP codes you use to route calls. You can also enter an asterisk (*) to match to any value for that data field.
10. If you added a secondary condition in step 6 of this guide, enter each result you expect for that datapoint in its corresponding column as well.
11. Find the column in your template spreadsheet for the destination phone call marketing data field you created in step 2 of this guide. For each row of your spreadsheet, enter the destination phone number you’d like that routing condition to lead to. When you are finished, save your spreadsheet file.
12. If you'd like to make your routing data friendly for your Invoca reports, check out How to add reporting data to your lookup tables.
13. Go back to your Invoca browser window. Click the Choose File button and select the lookup table spreadsheet you just saved. Then, click Upload.

For an optimal upload experience, it is recommended that you do not upload more than 200,000 rows in your spreadsheet. If you have a use case for uploading more than 200,000 rows in a single spreadsheet please reach out to us at support@invoca.com to discuss.

You now have a new lookup table with all your call routing data. Next, we’ll apply that routing data to your Invoca phone calls.
 

Section 2: Adding your routing table logic to an Invoca campaign

1. Return to your Invoca dashboard. In the sidebar menu, click Campaigns, then select Manage Campaigns.
2. In the list of your campaigns, select the campaign you’d like to use, or create a new Invoca campaign.
3. Scroll down to the Call Treatment menu and click Edit.
4. Click the “At the start of the call” drop-down menu and select Forward to marketing data field.
    
   Note:
   If you already have call treatment options set for this Invoca campaign, consult this guide to How to understand, build, and edit a call treatment for your Invoca campaign  to determine where in your IVR tree to place your routing conditions.
    
5. Click the “Marketing Data field” drop-down menu and select the marketing data field you created in step 2 of the previous section.
6. Click the “Else, if marketing data field value isn’t a phone number” drop-down menu and select Forward to call center. Then, in the Phone number text box below, enter the phone number for your overflow call center.
7. When you are finished, click Save.

 
Congratulations, you’ve now set up your Invoca account to route phone calls from one Invoca campaign to each of your call centers! You can use this new functionality to better serve local customers, personalize your customer’s call treatment with information from their customer journey, and set up phone call-based Signals to evaluate the performances of your local branches.
 

Related:
• Basic Knowledge: RingPools
• How to understand, build, and edit a call treatment for your Invoca campaign 
• How to add reporting data to your lookup tables