Waterfall routing: always reach a human

A waterfall rings your people one after another until someone picks up. It is the single feature that turns a phone number into a business that answers.

How it works

Add a Waterfall node and list contacts in order. When a call reaches the node, Taki:

1. Rings the first contact for the ring time you set, on the number they are currently reachable at.
2. If they do not answer, waits the short delay you set, then rings the next one.
3. Repeats down the list until someone answers.
4. Sends the call out of the success port if a human answered, or the fail port if the list ran out.

Every contact in the list also gets its own port, so you can wire a specific person to a specific outcome when you need to. Most flows only use success and fail.

Ring time is the setting that matters

Ring time is per person. Twenty seconds is a good default: long enough to dig a phone out of a pocket, short enough that a caller does not give up.

Be careful with a subtle trap. If a contact's mobile sends unanswered calls to their personal voicemail after 18 seconds, and your ring time is 25 seconds, their voicemail answers the call. Taki sees an answer, the waterfall stops, and your caller is talking to a personal voicemail greeting instead of the next person on the list. Set your ring time below the mobile carrier's voicemail timeout, or turn off personal voicemail on work-facing numbers.

Availability, not guesswork

A waterfall skips contacts who are marked unavailable, so the list can be long without wasting the caller's time. Availability comes from three places:

• The contact sets it themselves in the contact portal.
• An admin sets it in Contacts.
• A schedule on the contact makes them available only during their shift.

If every contact in the list is unavailable, the waterfall goes straight to fail without ringing anyone, which is the correct behavior at 2am.

Cell numbers stay hidden

The waterfall dials your staff through Twilio, so their personal mobile numbers are never exposed to the caller. Caller ID shows your business number. If the employee calls a customer back from inside Taki, the same masking applies in the other direction.

This is also what makes departures painless: when someone leaves, you remove the contact, and every flow that referenced them stops trying to reach them. Their extension can be rerouted to whoever inherits their work without touching a single flow.

Keeping the caller company

Silence for a minute feels like being ignored. Set the trying prompt on the waterfall node to something honest, for example: One moment, I am finding someone who can help. The caller hears it once as the waterfall starts, then hold music while it works.

Always wire the fail port

The fail port is the promise you make to a caller who came at a bad time. Wire it to a voicemail box, or to a Say node that gives your hours followed by voicemail. A waterfall whose fail port dead ends is how calls get silently lost.

A pattern that works

A shape used by most small teams:

1. Incoming call to Hours branch.
2. Open goes to Say greeting, then Waterfall with the on-shift staff.
3. Waterfall fail goes to Voicemail with the general box.
4. Closed goes to a Say node with your hours, then the same Voicemail node.

Four nodes and one branch, and no caller ever hits a dead end.