Call triage and transfer for retail and ecommerce
Every call gets answered, understood, and routed: handled by the AI, transferred with context, or ticketed for later. Your team only hears the calls that need them. Frontdesk runs it for shoppers.
Trigger
Any inbound call.
Built from
Why teams set this up
Whoever answers the phone becomes the router, and routing interrupts whatever they were paid to do.
Staff answer only the calls that need staff
Transfers arrive with context attached
Nothing rings out and nothing gets lost
How the automation runs
Of forty morning calls, twenty-six end at the AI with answers, nine become tickets, and five transfer through, each preceded by a text saying who is on the line and what they want. The office manager’s phone rings five times instead of forty.
- 1AI receptionist
The AI answers and identifies what the caller needs
- 2Knowledge base
Questions it can answer end right there
- 3Conditional branch
Your routing rules decide who gets what
- 4Team notification
Transfers arrive with a heads-up of who is calling and why
- 5Smart ticket
Everything else becomes an assigned ticket
How retail and ecommerce teams run it
Store calls route between floor, fulfillment, and corporate with context, and the rest get answered outright.
Synced with your systems
Built from standard Frontdesk blocks
No custom development. Each step is a building block you can rearrange, retime, or extend, so this workflow can grow into the next one.
Onboarding journeys that include this workflow
This workflow is one step inside larger onboarding journeys that run the full customer lifecycle.
Customer onboarding
Give each customer a clear, responsive onboarding journey across channels and internal teams.
See the journey →Welcome flow automation
Deliver the right welcome, expectations, resources, and human handoff at the right time.
See the journey →Account setup automation
Detect missing setup steps and provide contextual help before customers stall.
See the journey →Common questions
How does the call triage and transfer workflow start?
Any inbound call.
Which channels does this use?
This workflow runs over inbound voice. Each step can use the channel that fits the customer and the urgency.
Can my team stay in control of when it fires?
Yes. The trigger can be a field a person flips on a ticket or contact, so a human makes the decision and Frontdesk does the follow-through. Any step can also route to a teammate with the transcript and collected data.
Does it keep our records up to date?
Every call, text, and email in the workflow is logged against the contact and ticket, with transcripts attached. Frontdesk can also sync contacts and fields to your CRM.
What happens when a customer needs a human?
The workflow hands off with context: the right teammate gets the full history, the transcript, and the collected answers, so the customer never repeats themselves.
Which systems does this work with for retail and ecommerce businesses?
Frontdesk can work with HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Google Calendar, Outlook, Webhooks, plus API and webhook connections for custom systems, so every conversation lands on the right record.
Thinking bigger than one workflow?
The customer journey library maps full lifecycle automations across activation, onboarding, retention, and growth.
Explore customer journeys →This workflow also runs for any industry.
See the all-industry version →More from front office and reception
Every caller greeted, understood, and routed, in any language, with their history loaded.
Bilingual call answering
The AI greets in English, continues in Spanish when the caller prefers it, and serves both with the same knowledge and booking calendar.
Known-caller recognition
Repeat callers skip the interrogation. The AI loads their history before the first hello and picks up where the last conversation ended.
Phone intake forms
Your intake form, administered by voice. The AI asks every field, validates the answers, and files the result as a structured ticket.