Engineering

Why we built routing in plain language instead of flowcharts.

2026-04-19 · 4 min read · The OonoBox team

Most customer-conversation tools express routing as a visual flowchart. It looks impressive in a sales demo. It feels terrible to maintain at 2 a.m. when the wrong agent is paged for a complaint.

We took a different bet. Routing in OonoBox reads like English. 'Sales WhatsApp goes to Tariro. Complaints go to Rufaro. Anything mentioning a refund goes to the owner.' That is the rule. There is no second representation.

Under the hood it compiles to a simple decision list. But the source of truth, the thing you read and edit, is the plain-language version.

Two consequences. First, the non-technical teammate who actually owns customer ops can change the rules without a meeting. Second, when something goes wrong, the postmortem reads itself. The rule that fired is the rule you can quote in a Slack message.

Flowcharts are a beautiful answer to a different problem.

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