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Simple to set up. Easy to use. Powerful integrations.
Get free accessContact centers help businesses provide a consistent customer service and sales experience and give customers a reliable way to contact you with questions or issues. If you want to maximize the productivity of your contact center operations, you need to implement interactive voice response (IVR) technology.
IVR systems have numerous features that can benefit contact centers, including custom flows, call routing, voice recognition, and customer service automation.
But to make the most of IVR technology, you need to follow best practices like:
Use a professional voice for menu items
Keep menus up-to-date
Ensure navigation is intuitive
Use high-quality voice recognition
Offer multiple language options
Allow for voice or dialback response
Keep prompts concise
Make human support readily available
Make all main departments easily accessible
Keep wait times short
Analyze data and optimize your approach
This article outlines how to improve business processes by making customer interactions as smooth as possible with IVR.
IVR System Overview
IVR is a type of automated phone system technology that uses a pre-recorded menu of options that callers can interact with to access the agent, department, or information they need.
This form of customer service automation takes pressure off businesses by eliminating the need for a receptionist or operator to forward calls, freeing up your contact center employees to focus on more high-level tasks and interactions.
IVR systems are also highly scalable, allowing businesses to grow with ease—as the technology evolves with you and enables you to handle a greater volume of customer communications without having to significantly scale your team.
Benefits of an IVR Solution
IVR systems are beneficial for businesses in that they automate basic telephonic tasks.They handle call routing by presenting options to the caller who can select the one that most accurately relates to their query. The software then routes their call to the correct person or department with no hands-on intervention from your staff.
Other benefits of IVR include:
Customer self-service, which not only frees up contact center employees but also improves customer satisfaction, as callers can get the answers they need in seconds.
An improved customer journey, as calls are directed to the correct department the first time.
Fewer employees needed to handle requests, which decreases operational costs.
A more personalized customer experience, thanks to integrations with CRM solutions, providing an optimized customer journey.
Discover an advanced IVR solution that helps you provide a smoother customer experience and free up your contact center staff. Try Aircall for free.
Best Practices for Using IVR Systems
IVR can be a powerful tool—but only if you implement it accurately and leverage all its potential. Follow these IVR setup tips and best practices to optimize your contact center operations, boost your productivity, and improve customer satisfaction.
1. Use a professional voice for IVR menus
Customers expect a professional experience no matter where or how they make contact, which is why it’s important to have clear, high-quality audio for your IVR menu options. This shows callers you’ve put effort into creating a smooth experience for them.
They also want a cohesive brand experience, so if you operate in a more serious industry, like healthcare, keep your audio helpful and informative. On the other hand, if you’re in a more casual sector, like ecommerce, your IVR menu audio can be a bit more entertaining and engaging.
2. Keep menus up-to-date
Your business is always evolving, and your IVR menu options need to evolve with it. As you add new products or services, consider how your customers will get in touch with you to enquire about them or resolve issues.
It’s also a good idea to account for the most frequently-asked questions about your offering so you can anticipate customer needs and automatically give them the answers they need. These questions may change over time, so do periodically survey your sales and customer support teams to learn what inquiries customers most often have.
3. Ensure navigation is intuitive
Customers don’t want their call bounced from one department to another—as this wastes their time and causes frustration. And they shouldn't be left guessing where their call will be forwarded to after going through your IVR menu items. So be sure to create a straightforward navigation experience that satisfies the customer’s query in as few steps, and as little time, as possible.
Clearly list navigation options to get your customers directed to the right department quickly, such as “press one if you have a question for sales, press two if you need support with one of our products, and press three if you have another query.”
4. Use high quality voice recognition
Moving onto the AI implementation side of IVR, advanced voice recognition features make the contact center experience seamless and help prevent potential customer frustrations.
The quality of your voice recognition software is key, so find a tool with powerful AI capabilities that will pick up customers’ responses on the first try, even with background noise or low audio quality.
5. Offer multiple language options
Whether your customer base is local, international, or both, it’s important that you cater to customers’ language requirements; no sales prospect or loyal customer should feel excluded because they can’t reach you in the language they’re more comfortable with.
Many IVR systems allow you to offer multiple language options to your callers, and they can automatically route a call to a person who speaks the language chosen on the IVR menu. So while you don’t need to offer dozens of different languages, do some research to figure out which languages your customers speak.
6. Allow for voice response or manual input
To make your IVR system accessible for all users, give them the option to respond to menu items via voice or by dialing numbers. This is a simple feature that nevertheless helps you ensure the customer experience is as smooth as possible.
For example, give your customers options to either list out their order number or input it onto their keypad. Or if your IVR system asks yes or no questions, callers should be able to respond themselves or input a number (like one or two) to indicate their response.
7. Keep prompts concise
If you don’t have a toll-free number, time is money for your customers, and every second they spend on the phone with you may be costing them. Even if your number is free to call, customers don’t want to spend their precious time on the line listening to an extensive list of menu items.
So keep IVR prompts and responses concise and to-the-point. This also helps make communication with callers clearer, improving the chances of them having a positive interaction with your business.
8. Make human support readily available
Automated responses are very helpful and can often resolve a customer’s issues, but they have their limitations. In these cases, callers need to be able to speak to one of your employees to work out their more complicated issues. So make it easy for customers to reach an agent in your contact center—meaning it should be one of the first menu items in your IVR directory.
For example, they can either press a number (say, zero) or simply remain on the line to be connected with someone in your contact center. And your voice recognition software should immediately contact the customer with a live agent if they say “speak with a representative” or something similar.
9. Make all main departments easily accessible
Customers shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to reach the department they need, and your IVR menu should be able to connect callers with the relevant team. Not every customer will dial the correct number when they need to resolve an issue, so make sure the IVR menu for your main contact can direct them to anywhere they might need to reach.
If you’re a financial institution, for example, this could include accounts, fraud, customer service, and account balance inquiries. These different departments will, of course, depend on the nature of your business.
10. Keep wait times short (and be honest about them)
Balancing business costs with having enough staff to handle queries is a challenge, and to minimize staffing expenses, you want to have the minimum amount of agents needed to field customer calls in a timely manner.
Other best practices on this list, like connecting callers with the right department from your IVR menu, will help you keep wait times short. Nonetheless, it’s a good idea to keep callers informed of how long their wait time is going to be. Leaving them without a clue as to how long they’ll wait makes for a bad customer experience and can cause frustration.
Pro tip: If longer wait times are impossible to avoid, offer the option for queue callback. This allows customers to get on with their day and receive an outbound call as soon as one of your agents becomes available.
11. Analyze data and optimize your approach
When choosing an IVR system, select software that comes with call recording and analytics features that can help you track relevant metrics and measure how effective your call center is. You can use these insights to determine where callers might be dropping off or facing frustration.
Additionally, ask customers for direct feedback on their calls, which enables you to pinpoint exactly what you’re doing well and where you have room for improvement. This analysis will help you optimize your IVR menu and train your call center agents so you can improve the customer experience.
Use Aircall’s IVR Feature for Smoother Operations and a Better Customer Experience
Ultimately, the success of your IVR system depends on the platform you use to implement it. At Aircall, it’s our mission to make using our cloud IVR system as seamless as possible for you and your customers.
With Aircall, you get multi-level IVRs with Smartflows Call Routing, a dynamic visual editor, music and audio messages, ring groups, and other AI-powered features—all designed to make customer communications seamless for both callers and agents.
Says Aircall customer CommonBond, “It was really easy to set up an IVR with Aircall. With a phone tree, you could press one to talk to someone about refinancing, press two to talk to someone about new student loans and so on. That's useful because it also tracks why people are calling in.”
Discover an advanced IVR solution that helps you provide a smoother customer experience and free up your contact center staff. Try Aircall for free.
Published on October 25, 2024.
