An accounting firm where reaching the right person took three transfers

A client calls the main line and hits the automated menu. They type the name of the partner they want, and the directory sends them to someone else, an employee in another department, or to reception. Reception transfers them to a colleague who can't help, who sends them back to reception, who tries again. A simple thing, confirming a meeting or reaching a known contact, could take three or four transfers and still end in a voicemail.

The directory itself was part of the problem. Staff who had left the firm were still listed, so callers were routed to extensions nobody answered. Reception spent a large part of the day as a human switchboard, re-routing calls the system should have placed correctly, and every misroute was a client left with the impression that a careful firm couldn't manage its own front door.

We started with the directory, because routing is only as good as the data behind it. The firm's list of people, roles, and extensions became a single live source that updates when someone joins, changes teams, or leaves, so a departed employee stops being a destination the moment they're gone.

On top of it we built an inbound front desk that listens to what the caller actually wants, a person by name, a department, or a kind of question, and matches it against the live directory before placing the call. When the intended person is out, it offers the right alternative or takes a structured message instead of dead-ending in a mailbox. Reception keeps full oversight and can step in on anything unusual, but stops being the fallback for routing the system should handle on its own.

Callers now reach the right person on the first try in the large majority of cases, and the chain of transfers that used to define a simple call is mostly gone. The firm stopped routing clients to people who had left, because the directory the system reads is the same one HR keeps current.

Reception got roughly twelve hours a week back, time that had gone to manually patching calls through, and now spends it on work that needs a person. The quieter result is reputational: clients calling a firm they trust with their numbers no longer get bounced around the building to reach someone they already know.