Phone Trees

Introduction to phone trees

A phone tree or auto attendant presents a caller with two or more options when they call your Spruce number. Adding a phone tree helps you triage inquiries, increase efficiency, and manage patient needs any time of day. Practices using Spruce commonly have two phone trees, one for clinic hours and one for after hours, set up to match their business schedule. 

For example, if a caller dials your Spruce number during business hours they may hear:

Press 1 if you are a new patient, press 2 if you are an existing patient and would like to speak to a provider, press 3 if your question is related to billing. 

If a caller dials your Spruce number after hours they may hear:

Press 1 if this is non-urgent and can be addressed the next business day, press 2 if this is urgent and you'd like to page the on-call provider. 

Phone trees are available to customers on our Communicator plan ($49/user/month). Customers cannot create their own phone tree. Please continue reading this resource for directions on how to submit your phone tree request to Spruce Support so that it is configured and added to your account. Email support@sprucehealth.com with a detailed description of your phone tree flow and all the necessary audio files in an mp3 format. You can use this document as a template for how to describe your phone tree flow. 

Phone tree best practices

When creating your phone tree be sure to have the patient experience in mind. Callers often find long greeting messages and multiple levels of options to be frustrating and we find that more complex phone trees have a higher instance of hang-ups (you will see these noted in the call record as a missed call with the notation [Start] showing that they hung up without making a selection). We suggest no more than four options for a standard phone tree, with only a 'Directory' option leading to additional options. The best approach to phone trees is to create them as a representation of your practice- if only one person is answering phones you may not need a phone tree; if two people are answering different types of calls you may only need two branches. We discourage customers from creating many branches that all route to the same staff person as this generally causes frustration for patients without helping your practice to organize. Feel free to ask us for advice on how best to set up your tree!

Phone trees can be an excellent organizational tool for your practice! We can set each option on the phone tree to auto-assign conversations to a specific team or staff member, this means those conversations would appear in a specific mailbox rather than in the All Inbox. Be sure to ask about this feature when setting up your phone tree! 

Phone tree templates

These phone tree templates are meant to guide you so that you understand the parameters to design your phone tree. You do not need to follow these templates exactly, they only serve to provide examples of common ways customers outline their phone tree. 

• Department by extension
• Team member by extension
• Language by extension 
• Urgent escalation 

Clinic hours templates

Department by extension 

The following template is used to direct patients to a specific "department." It opens with a main greeting that welcomes callers to your practice and directs them to select an extension. You can outline you phone tree so that each extension rings a unique number or group of teammates, or so that a given extension does not ring, and instead goes directly to voicemail. Each extension can have a unique audio file for the voicemail greeting. In the example below, the voicemail greetings are outlined in the black text and white bubble background. 

Team member by extension 

The following template is used to direct patients to a specific staff member. It opens with a main greeting that welcomes callers to your practice and directs them to select an extension. Each extension can ring a different provider or group of providers. Each extension can have a unique audio file for the voicemail greeting. In the example below, the voicemail greetings are outlined in the black text and white bubble background. 

Language phone tree

The following template is used to direct patients to different people and voicemail greetings based on their preferred language. It opens with a main greeting that welcomes callers to your practice and directs them to select an extension. Each extension can have a unique audio file for the voicemail greeting––so each extension has a voicemail greeting spoken in the specified language. In the example below, the voicemail greetings are outlined in the black text and white bubble background. 

After hours template

Urgent escalation 

The following template is used to direct patients to specific extensions that would notify you after hours. It opens with a main greeting that explains they have reached your practice after hours and it directs them to select an extension. In this example, the extensions are urgent and non-urgent. The non-urgent extension goes directly to voicemail, and the urgent extension rings the on-call doctor. A notification system can also be enabled so that the on-call doctor receives an SMS text notification indicating that an urgent voicemail has been left. 

Call Forwarding 

Once your phone tree is created, you will have a group for each extension which we call a Ring Group. Ring Groups define which phone(s) should ring when a certain phone tree extension is selected. This is to ensure that the right team member(s) is being reached. Ring Groups don't exist by default in your account, they are created for you by the Spruce Support team when they configure a phone tree on your account. 

Each Ring Group contains a list of external phone numbers, VoIP phones, and/or teammates in your organization. You can manage which phones ring when a given phone tree extension is dialed by adjusting the phone numbers selected to ring in each Ring Group. To clarify, you can have a phone tree with just one or multiple Spruce business numbers. Team members are able to take calls from any extension directly on their cell phone or VoIP phone, as long as they're listed in the Ring Group for the specified extension. Each "item" (i.e., a VoIP phone, phone number, or teammate) in a Ring Group can be enabled or disabled individually. 

For example, changing your Ring Group settings would allow you to do the following:

• Route calls to a different desk phone or person based on who's working in the office on a particular day.
• Ring the appropriate provider after-hours based on who is on-call for a given shift.
• Forward calls to a covering physician when a provider goes on vacation.

• Manage existing Ring Groups 

• Simultaneous and sequential dialing

When you request to build your phone tree with Spruce Support, you can elect one of the two behaviors for each extension's Ring Group:

• Simultaneous ringing: all enabled numbers in the Ring Group will ring at the same time. The first person to pick up will connect with the caller; the other call attempts will be dropped once the call is answered.
• Sequential ringing: the enabled numbers in the Ring Group will ring one at a time, starting with the number that has gone the longest without answering a Spruce call, and skipping any numbers that are currently engaged in an active Spruce call. This is commonly known as Round Robin.

How to set up a phone tree 

You will need to submit your request to create a phone tree to support@sprucehealth.com. Please note, phone tree requests take 3-5 business days for us to implement after we receive your request. 

Submit a Phone Tree Request

Here is an example phone tree request: 

How to record and upload audio greetings 

Edit Existing Phone Tree 

Update structure and extension or branches

Please submit all phone tree edits (except greetings) via email to support@sprucehealth.com. Please note, phone tree updates take 3-5 business days for us to implement after we receive your request. If the edit entails replacing audio files, please upload in app instructions below.

Replace audio files for an existing phone tree

If you're looking to replace the audio files on an existing phone tree, without any changes to the phone tree structure please log into Spruce on your computer go to Settings, Phone & SMS, Greetings & Prompts. 

1. Confirm that the old recordings are already listed in this section (message Team Spruce if you do not see them
2. You will also see where it says, "In Use On" and this is saying which phone tree or direct number it is being used on currently.
3. Find the recording you would like to replace and click on the "Edit:
4. Select "Replace Audio" (upper right)
5. There you can either upload an audio file from your computer by selecting "Select Audio File" 
6. If you prefer to record one right now, select "Record Audio" then click the red microphone button to begin recording and then click the same place with the square stop icon to stop recording. 
7. Either way make sure to name your recording and a description. Tip to add the date to your title. 

Note: If you originally shared your recordings via email or Spruce Support thread (our old system) and you want to replace an audio file, you will need to email the updated audio files (in mp3 format) to support@sprucehealth.com. If you want to replace the entire phone tree and all greetings you can follow instructions above on creating a new phone tree by uploading all greetings and emailing support the structure. 

Video of Replacing Audio for Existing Phone Trees or Voicemails

Switch manually between phone trees or remove a phone tree

Should you want to switch to a different phone tree such as moving to after-hours phone tree. If you would like to have a particular holiday greeting play instead of your after hours phone tree please send us the updated holiday recording to our email support@sprucehealth.com, ideally send before the holiday so you are ready to switch it when you take the holiday. We recommend creating a generic 'Holiday Phone Tree' so that you can manually make this change when needed. We are not able to accommodate last minute phone tree changes prior to specific holidays.

Follow these steps to manually override your clinic hours phone tree to play your after hours or holiday phone tree on holidays and other times your office is closed. Note instructions below are for web but you can do this on your Spruce mobile app as well.

Video on how to switch manually between phone trees or remove a phone tree