Newsletter 
May I take your order? Designing an Order Line
If I had a nickel for every phone-based order line that customers requested...
In recent months, we have seen a surge in requests for basic order lines for one or more products. Through a combination of built-in Angel.com Voice Pages, and external third-party services, Angel.com provides a complete solution for product ordering that includes a phone-based shopping cart, name and address capture, and real-time billing to a credit card. The typical high-level call flow for a product order line is shown below. Also, as an example, you can call our sample order line at 888-205-5805.
Product Info & Shopping Cart
The first step in the order line is to present the different products available for purchase, and collect the type and quantity of each product the caller desires. For a single product order line, this step reduces to collecting the quantity of the product, which can be done through a single Question Page with a 'Number' Response Type. For more than one product, this process is repeated, and the application must then retain the state of the "shopping cart", i.e., the type and quantity of each product.
How you maintain the state of the shopping cart depends on if the number of products is fixed, or if there can be an open-ended number of items in the shopping cart. For a fixed number of products, a Data File can be used to maintain the state, using separate columns for the quantity of each product in the shopping cart. When the caller adds a product, a Data Page updates the column corresponding to that product in the Data File. For a variable number of products, an external script would store the state, in a database or in session variables. Each time the caller adds a product, a Transaction Page would send an update to the external script, which would then update the state of its internal shopping cart.
At the end of this process, the caller has selected the items and it's time to "checkout".
Name and Address Capture
Now that the caller's shopping cart is complete, it's time to start the checkout process, for which name and address capture is a key step (along with credit card capture, of course, which is covered below). It is a best practice to use a multi-step process for capturing name and address, starting with a reverse-lookup of the caller's home phone number, followed by confirmation of the name and address returned by the reverse-lookup. If the reverse-lookup data is not confirmed (or not returned at all, such as may be the case with callers from mobile phones), then the fallback is record-and-transcription of the name and address information.
A Transaction Page is used to send the home phone number to the third-party reverse-lookup service, which then returns the name and address in plain text as Angel.com Site Variables. Sample AngelXML returned from a reverse-lookup by our partner, NDIS, is shown below:
We have seen a 70-80%+ accuracy rate for the reverse-lookup data. For the lookups that do not return accurate data, there does need to be a fallback process for capturing the name/address info. If transcription is used, you can expect a turnaround time of 24-48 hours for the return of the name and address data from the transcription firm. Angel.com has partnerships with third-party transcription firms, and can bundle this service with your Angel.com Service Plan
At this point in the call flow, we've captured the products that the caller wants, along with the caller's name and address, now it's time make some money!
Credit Card Capture and Authorization
An Angel Question Page has two built-in Response Types for credit card capture: 'Credit Card', and 'Credit Card Expiration'. The security code on a credit card (CVV/CVC) can be captured by a Question Page with a 'Number' Response Type, with the response limited to 3 digits (or 4 digits for AmEx).
The Question Page will do initial authorization of the credit card by checking the checksum. Full authorization of the credit card is done through a Transaction Page, where the credit card info is delivered in real-time to a third-party payment gateway, such as Authorize.net. The card is authorized, and a status code returned as a variable to the Voice Site. Depending on the status code, a Logic Page in the Voice Site then takes the caller to the next step, or asks for different credit card information.
At this point, the transaction is complete, and the product has been ordered. An optional step prior to authorizing the credit card would be to up-sell the caller to new products - a strong sales pitch combined with the convenience of speech recognition for the caller to take immediate action can drive up the average sales transaction.
Again, check out our sample order line at 888-205-5805 as a reference. To find out how to incorporate best practices like this into your Angel.com Voice Site, contact Steve Brown, VP, Angel.com Client Services, brown@angel.com.
