Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is a contact center technology that enables effective interaction between the operating system (computer) and the customers. This is done through the implementation of Dual Tone Multi-Frequency (DTMF) and voice tones input via a keypad.
A good IVR system offers callers instant gratification, easy navigation, quick resolutions, and easy-to-understand menus. It helps contact centers reduce wait times, optimize resources, and considerably increase call volume intake.
Which Businesses Use IVR?
Businesses that see digital transformation as a major investment center in their operations are primarily using IVR systems to interact with their customers and business partners.
Here are some relevant use cases across diverse industries:
1. Banking and Finance:
From updating KYC details to enquiring about new products such as loans and benefits, customers call contact centers for a variety of purposes. For example, most banks offer an IVR-operated OTP generation option to customers. Credit card companies also provide IVR services to block a card or enhance credit limits.
2. Airlines:
Customers seek a constant update on their travel itinerary, including flight status, weather news, and upgrades to a new class. Many airlines and travel booking agencies use an IVR system to modernize their customer service management by constantly upgrading their menu options for upgrades, delays, cancellations, and refunds.
3. Healthcare:
Slowly, the healthcare industry has also begun utilizing the prowess of IVRs to modernize their patient care management systems. These are linked to patient feedback, surveys, appointment scheduling, lab results, follow-ups, and much more.
4. IT and Telecom:
Looking for a quick fix to your broken internet line? Unable to pay the dues for your mobile bills? Or, switching to a different calling plan? All these can be done using IVRs that top telecom companies offer to their customers. In simple steps, customers can get useful information about their queries and if still dissatisfied with the response, can escalate the query to an integrated channel to speak with a live human agent.
5. Logistics and Transportation:
Shipment tracking is so easy with IVR systems. Many shipping companies are on IVRs to ease delivery-related queries about cargo location and pick-up facilities.
6. Retail and E-commerce:
Disgruntled customers use inbound calling facilities to book for return or seek refunds. By doing it using IVRs, contact centers in retail and e-commerce businesses save a lot of cost and time without disrupting their brand values.
7. Government and Public Sector:
Government and public sector organizations could receive up to 20 million calls in a month. Most of these would be repetitive and non-emergency—- for which IVR systems are the best solution to handle the crisis. without human intervention, citizens can raise their complaints and garner information on their own.
Role of IVR in Improving Customer Experience
Across all segments, we see how customer service centers can use IVRs to manage high call volumes with limited resources.
By providing the right information and call routing, this technology helps contact centers handle high call volumes, reduce call queues and decrease abandon rates across calls.
Here is a list of ways in which IVR can improve customer experience:
Brand Perception
A good experience begins with a welcoming note. It is very important for a brand to be able to create a good first impression the minute a customer calls. A quick call pick-up offers instant gratification to callers and sets the right tone immediately. An IVR with a crisp, friendly welcome note and a user-friendly menu helps to reinforce this positive impact.
Instant Gratification
Our study reveals that the one thing customers value above all is an immediate response to their inquiries. Instead of keeping a customer waiting in a call queue, an IVR helps answer calls instantly. The time that would have been spent waiting idly on hold in proactively getting the right information.
Self-service
A study highlights how 77% of customers view brands more positively when they provide self-service options for customer support. We have seen multiple instances where the implementation of a self-service IVR has considerably reduced call wait times and improved CSAT.
Self-service IVR technology is becoming more widely accepted by customers as the quickest means of answering basic questions like finding a technician, tracking online orders, placing an order, locating a retail store or hotel address, making payments, and getting other updates.
Optimized routing
The IVR menu options work alongside skill routing features to help contact centers connect the caller to the right department. This simple move saves a caller time explaining who and what they have called for and then connecting to the right agent.
Moreover, this enables contact centers to divide their teams into specialized groups skilled at answering a particular query. This means that when the caller connects to the agent, this agent is far better equipped to answer their query.
Calls are resolved faster, and the contact center can see a marked uptick in customer experience metrics such as First Call Resolution, CSAT, and Average Handle Times.
Personalized Experience
Finally, IVR, when integrated with CRM, can offer prioritized call routing and personalized messages for callers, creating a premium experience based on customer segmentation and caller history.
How to Improve the IVR Experience?
Here are some tips on how to design an IVR to improve customer experience.
1. Simplicity and Clarity are Pivotal.
Customers are least interested in listening to long wait tunes, complex and multiple options. This leads to frustration and call-drop-offs. As a solution, IVR systems should offer short, crisp, and to-the-point messages.
When designing natural language messages, extensively research and test your speech recognition engine and determine the best phrases and language to ensure maximum resonance with the customers.
2. Design Good Routing.
Leverage IVR systems that integrate with your CRM and offer ACD and skill routing to create a better customer experience. Carefully plan and route callers to the right teams based on location, time of the day, customer segmentation, and more. Use ACD, or Automatic Call Distribution, to ensure that calls are routed optimally between your agents. This reduces the stress on agents leading to better call resolutions, and also ensures that you keep call waiting times minimal.
3. Personalize Brand Music and Messaging.
Create the right brand tone and messaging by carefully choosing wait for tunes, greeting messages, recorded texts, etc. You can even choose to use your own voice to record these messages for a more personalized feeling.
4. Prioritize the Right Customers
Ensure that your IVR systems help you prioritize your important and high-value clients and their calls via personalized messages, automatic and direct routing to an expert team and reduced call wait times.
9. Offer an Omnichannel Selection
An IVR can work in tandem with other channels to improve the customer experience. For instance, you can deflect callers waiting in queue to WhatsApp, enable voice mail or offer callbacks for those waiting beyond a few seconds, and follow up abandoned calls with an SMS.
11. Add Conversational IVR Systems
Callers see conversational, interactive voice responses as being friendlier and more human. To function, this IVR system just requires vocal input. It can understand what callers say, mean and engages in conversation without limiting the answers to monosyllables like “yes” or “no”.
A conversational IVR system can tap into NLP (natural language processing) to recognize your customers’ natural speech patterns. This intelligent IVR system can comprehend any content, context, and intent of messages.
Integrating a self-service, intuitive and speech-enabled conversational IVR system can remodel any contact center’s entire customer experience strategy.
