The step vocabulary: everything a call flow can do
Ring agents, AI call bot, nested call flow, IVR menu, business hours, voicemail, hang up — plus conditions. That is the entire language.
The whole vocabulary is short on purpose. A short vocabulary means every flow in your workspace is built from the same parts, and anyone who has read one can read all of them.
It also means there are things you cannot express, and that is the trade. If you find yourself wanting a step that does not exist, the answer is almost always an AI call bot with a function — because that is where open-ended behaviour belongs.
Before you start
- Nothing. Read it before you build a flow so you know what the pieces are.
Reference
Ring agents
Put it through to people, by the rule you set. Most flows start or end with this.
Always put a step after it. What happens when nobody answers is the important half, and a Ring agents step with nothing below it is a call that rings out into silence.
AI call bot
Hand the call to a voice agent, mid-flow. The bot answers from that point on and follows its own instruction, voice and handover conditions.
This is the highest-value step in the product when placed after Ring agents: the call your team missed becomes a conversation rather than a lost lead.
Call flow
Nest another flow. Build once, reuse everywhere — this is how one "after hours" flow serves six numbers without being copied six times.
IVR menu
The classic press-1 tree, when it genuinely helps. Often it does not: an AI agent that simply asks "what can I help with?" handles the same job without making anybody listen to five options.
Business hours
Branch on whether you are open, read from the channel's hours rather than defined here. One place hours live, and changing them changes every flow that reads them.
Voicemail
Take a message and put it on the contact timeline, where it sits beside every other thing that ever happened to that person rather than in a separate mailbox.
Hang up
End it cleanly. An explicit ending is a feature — it is much better than a caller sitting in silence wondering whether they are still connected.
Condition
If and else-if branches, each with its own chain of steps. This is what lets the other seven compose into something that handles a real business.
Put it to use
Read one of your existing flows out loud, step by step. If it makes sense as a spoken sentence, it will make sense to whoever inherits it. If it does not, it is too complicated.
The parts people get wrong
- Execution is a single pass down the list, stopping at the first thing that applies. Rearranging the steps is how you change the behaviour.
- There is deliberately no step for "wait and hope". Every path ends in a person, a bot, a message or a hang-up.
The ones people actually ask
Which step is the most valuable?
The AI call bot, placed immediately after Ring agents. That single arrangement turns the call your team missed into a conversation rather than a lost lead, and those calls currently have a value of zero.
Do I need an IVR menu?
Often not. If most callers pick the same option, remove the menu and go straight there. An AI agent that simply asks what the caller needs handles the same job without making anybody listen to five options.
Can a step come after voicemail?
No. Voicemail is terminating — nothing follows it and nothing can. That makes placement important: it belongs at the bottom of a path you are content to end, not in the middle of one you expect to continue.