What is Interactive Voice Response (IVR)? How & why to use it
Get IVR to enhance your contact center platform to better cater to your business needs.
![A woman listening to an IVR prompt](/content/dam/rc-www/en_us/images/content/contact-center/interactive-voice-response/july-2024/hero-jpg-rendition.webp)
![A woman listening to an IVR prompt](/content/dam/rc-www/en_us/images/content/contact-center/interactive-voice-response/july-2024/hero-tablet-jpg-rendition.webp)
Get IVR to enhance your contact center platform to better cater to your business needs.
One of the fastest ways to improve customer satisfaction is to deliver what the customer needs as quickly as possible. And what can be faster than when the customer is able to find the answer they need by themselves?
By implementing self-service options for simple processes and transactions, you ensure that customers no longer have to endure long wait times and hold times (or even deal with agents).
This also has the benefit of removing these simple processes from the agents’ plates. Meaning they get to take on more complex cases that IVR cannot handle.
IVR also helps agents provide better customer experience. How? By only sending them calls that they're equipped to handle.
Skills-based routing allows companies to detail the individual skills of their IVR call center agents so they can be intelligently selected.
Through a series of menu options, IVR can learn a caller’s problem, determine the skills needed to resolve it, and pass the call to the agent best equipped for the task.
This leads to a lower chance of sending a caller to an agent without the expertise to answer their questions, avoiding negative customer experiences.
Advanced IVR is no longer just limited to detecting touch-tone keypad responses. You can enable speech recognition technology that uses natural language processing.
It works like conversational AI (artificial intelligence) that picks up keywords and terms from the caller’s voice to determine why they’re calling.
This is especially helpful for customers who are visually impaired and may have difficulty navigating the IVR menu via telephone touchpad.
Another way you can set and manage customer expectations is by customizing how the IVR handles calls during business hours and after business hours.
If you don’t have enough people to support customer queries after business hours, you can present a different set of phone menus.
This should ideally be a limited version of your work hours menu. It doesn’t even have to include an option to talk to an agent—an automated greeting suggesting they leave a message or call again during business hours should be enough.
This way, your customers will not expect the same amount of attention as they would if they called within business hours.