Design the whole line, not one bot
Real member lines are not one agent. They are a greeter, a few specialists, something that books time, and a way to reach a person. Two canvases build that: a workflow of agents, and a phone menu for the callers who reach for the keypad.
Why more than one agent
One prompt covering claims, benefits, prior authorization, enrollment and scheduling is a prompt nobody can edit safely. Every change risks a subject it was not written for, and the agent hedges because it is holding too much at once.
Splitting the line means each agent has one subject, one knowledge base and a short prompt. A specialist can be strict, because it only ever gets calls the greeter decided belong to it. The claims agent can be edited by the claims team without anyone worrying about enrollment.
The node palette
A workflow is nodes and the conditions between them. Nodes fall into three groups: the ones that talk, the ones that hold data, and the ones that end or hand off the call.
Edges carry the context
An edge is not just an arrow. It decides what the next node knows: which variables travel, what the receiving agent is told about what already happened, and whether the caller hears a handover at all. Done well, a member never notices they have moved between agents.
Grounding a branch
Knowledge bases attach at the node level, so the claims branch reads claims policy and the pharmacy branch reads the formulary. Nothing is answering from a pile of every document you own, which is both more accurate and easier to keep current.
Advanced imaging needs prior authorization. Standard review is three business days.
Keep the phone menu if your members expect one
Plenty of member lines are not ready to answer with a conversation, and plenty of callers press one before anyone has finished speaking. The IVR designer builds that menu visually, and it is a full call-flow engine rather than a tree of recordings.
Any branch can end in an agent
This is the part that matters. Press one and you can land on a conversational agent instead of a submenu. Press three and you are in a human queue with your context attached. The menu becomes the front of the same system rather than a separate one bolted to it, and you can move a branch from menu to agent when you are ready rather than in one migration.
Test the whole flow, then keep the history
The test bar on the canvas puts you on a call at the entry point and runs the flow as configured, handoffs included. Workflows keep a version history the same way agents do, so a change to routing can be compared and rolled back.