Think about a customer placing a call to the concerned call center. A robotic voice greets the user and introduces a list of options relevant to the concerns. The customer manages to troubleshoot the concerns quickly with a response.  

The above instance is a feature of IVR, or Interactive Voice Response— the technology that helps callers to communicate with the business without connecting to an operator.  

In this blog post, let’s take a glance at IVR, its benefits, and the ways to automate call center operations using IVR tools.  

What is Interactive Voice Response? 

Interactive Voice Response is a feature of the phone system that helps businesses and customers to engage with the computer system either through touch-tone dialling or through voice.   

Through IVR, the automated telephony can experience core interactions with the callers with no need to intervene with a human operator. This saves the time of both agents and the users through efficient call management.  

An IVR system is the best way to route calls to a specific recipient. IVR can direct the customers to a series of options and menus that let them approach the right department. In this way, once they finally communicate with a human, it would be someone who can exactly help them out with their concerns.  

IVR system responses will play after the user enters the input. The responses would be digitally generated or pre-recorded voice, where the system can support and automatically direct or route calls depending upon the user’s responses.  

Clients can follow the voice input or keypad selection to communicate with the system. The responses could be a callback, text alert, voice, or even an email.  

Since these features don’t depend on a live operator, it minimizes the need for people to address the customer concerns and scale down the time agents have to spend on call routing or other repetitive tasks.  

Why Would a Call Center Use an IVR System? 

The traditional system used human customer service specialists who communicated to the customers and provided assistance over a dedicated customer support contact number.  

But with the technological revolution and IVR systems increasing dominance on online support features like live chat, FAQs etc, customers have switched over to self-service rather than making complete human interactions.  

77% of Customers consider brands more reliable if they invite users proactively and accept the customer feedback without any delay. It is also worth noting that about 90% of users expect customer service through an online portal.  

Customers demand self-service–the VoIP or Voice over IP helps you use self-service features with IVR system integrations. Hence, Companies should lay their major focus on digital transformation strategies to stay relevant and replace the traditional call center system.  

What does IVR bring to your company? 

Since the call center deals with many inbound calls, it would not be easy to maintain the flow and timeliness of the customer support you provide.  

This is what IVR can help your business with, to operate efficiently and help customer support agents to minimize the time they spend on resolving challenges customers face.  

To be precise, IVR assists agents to cater to the customers’ needs in time. The quick calls can be prioritized and resolved to give a great customer experience. The resolution time thus grows faster to serve the user’s needs promptly.  

How Does an IVR System Work? 

IVR system works as a part of your Computer Telephony Integration (CTI). To start working with IVR in a contact center, a dedicated IVR software and telegony board are required. You can set a pre-recorded greeting to welcome callers, in line with the user’s needs.  

The end-user can navigate the call center and resolve the queries quickly. When a customer places a call to the company, the IVR system greets the user and asks them to choose a specific option from the menu.  

For instance, Press ‘1’ to confirm the action on the particular service. The auto call routing is a boon to the businesses that result in increased user satisfaction, low operational costs and enhanced team productivity.  

Best practices to enhance your IVR operations  

When you design the IVR workflows, you should walk in your customers’ shoes. It is as simple as thinking about how your customers would proceed while you launch the IVR system.  

Hence, the IVR system should be reliable and easy to use. Here are the tips to improve your call center IVR system:  

1. Identify the customer personas to optimize the IVR platform 

When you develop the customer personas, make sure you determine which users are most likely to utilise your automated features.  

This can let you design the services to meet their self-service requirements. 

2. Handle calls in and beyond business hours 

The main essence of your IVR strategy should be to remain open even after business hours. An automated IVR assistant can handle the inbound calls to improve the customer experience.  

IVR should handle simple queries like locations, shipping information, balance inquiries, or store hours 

3. Survey to elevate user experience 

Understand what the customers feel about the IVR system to enhance its operations further.  

Put up a post-call survey that can help you gather actionable insights from the customers’ feedback.  

4. Maintain a simple IVR menu 

To enable customer understanding, you can go forward with a smaller menu. Start with the easiest service and then build up higher levels from them.  

More options that branch out from a specific selection can help to understand the user intent. But also keep in mind that almost 75% of callers believe IVR forces them to hear irrelevant choices.  

5. Redirect customers to the relevant agents 

You should address and support all customers quickly by being a support center. Set categories based on the common inquiries your customers might make.  

For complex transactions, you can pass the calls to the right agent to manage instead of robots to handle them. 

6. Natural language IVR 

With Natural language IVR systems, you can automate multiple transactions.  

This includes the launch of more complex applications and lets IVR systems realize new responses they might not have been fed before.  

7. Let the messages be short but sweet 

The callers can be busy, or might not be interested to hear everything in detail from you.  

Consider the time and record short messages your caller listens to through the IVR system. Maintain the messages without any verbal mistakes or background noise. 

8. Give information about the wait time or queue position 

Irrespective of the efficiency your IVR system has, callers will have to wait sometimes. This wait time can be reduced if you provide the right menu options.  

Also, you can mitigate their concerns with the right information on how long they should wait; so that they experience the happiest interaction through awareness about their queue position. 

9. Empathize with the audience 

The IVR system should be able to apologize to the customers for the inconvenience. You should tell callers and make them aware of the options to find solutions to their concerns.  

This could be with the means of your knowledge base or through a chatbot on your website.  

10. Offer an effortless opt-out 

At times, the caller may not want to use the IVR system or might not have time to go through it. But this doesn’t mean that their query is not significant. You should offer an easy opt-out option from the call routing system if they prefer.  

Give an option to the user to quickly seek live assistance. This can either let them transfer calls directly to the agent or choose to have a callback once the agent is available later. 

Ensure seamless integration with IVR 

All customers are not the same. There are those who prefer to talk to a representative and would pick up the calls to respond. But even in these cases, you can use the IVR system to understand the concerns and route the users to the right agent. Once your customers have a good experience, the rest of the things will follow.  

How to set up comprehensive integration of call center software using IVR technology? With Voxvalley IVR, you can use custom IVR features to cater to the particular needs, utilize the multiple menus to induce detailed customer choice, or even route the calls to assigned groups in your contact center. 

How does Voxvalley IVR automate customer interactions? 

With the speech enabled IVR systems, the technologies like AI and analytics can offer smart self service features built for callers to carry out effective routing options through an equipped call flow design system.  

This helps to reduce the customer waiting time and help you automate the customer support processes. Voxvalley has custom IVR APIs with effective business integration assisting  you with following functions: 

1. Initiate IVR calls to specific numbers, convert text to voice and play over the call, play recorded voice and upload a file, etc. 

2. Bring different callers to a single call using call bridging option and play voice message to the callers once call is connected 

3. Carry out promotional purposes using API to run auto voice call campaign 
    
    
    
   To kickstart your hassle-free customer support through IVR, check out a free trial here.