Interactive Voice Response (IVR) as a support channel for the contact center space constitutes one of the earliest automation trends in the industry. IVR acts as an automated attendant for contact centers by offering a combination of voice recognition and touch-tone keypad (DTMF) selections to steer callers through menu options, providing essential information, and connecting them to the right agent.
IVR technology has seen phenomenal growth over years due to large-scale adoption of advanced technologies such as AI & IoT and rise in cloud-based services. In 2020, the global IVR market was valued at USD 4.2 bn and it is expected to reach US$6.7bn by 2026 with a cumulative growth rate of 7.9%.
This growth is the because of how essential IVR has made itself to businesses, customer experience, and contact center efficiency. Amongst its notable gains:
- IVR can reduce the workload on agents by handling repetitive questions and letting them focus on more complicated query resolution.
- Because the IVR system guides customers via pre-recorded messages to payments and resetting signals, etc, it frees up call queues and prevents potential revenue loss from abandoned calls.
- IVR also helps allocate the right contact center agent to complicated issues, ensuring prompt and apt issue resolution from experts.
Let us deep dive into these benefits in more detail:
9 Big Benefits of an Efficient IVR System
1. Core Issue Resolved: Reduces Contact Center Congestion.
Up to 83% of customers would rather use self-service tools than contact with a human, particularly for straightforward operations like booking a flight, tracking a package, checking account balances, and so forth. An IVR system provides callers with IVR self-service alternatives so that they can access assistance for typical problems and commonly asked queries even after company hours.
This leaves them satisfied and reduces workloads on agents considerably, freeing up call queues and reducing caller wait times.
2. Improves Customer Call Experience with Customized IVR Menu.
The IVR menu sets the mood of the caller for the entire call experience and is therefore very important. An easy-to-follow and simple IVR menu helps your business guide the caller to the right teams specialized to handle their calls.
This simple action can lead to 25% to 30% reduction in average handle times. Customers have their queries answered by specialists and this leads to far higher customer satisfaction and boost customer trust and loyalty.
3. Increases First Contact Resolution
First contact resolution is a critical customer experience metric. IVR ensures first contact center solutions through intelligent call routing. By allocating calls to the agent or division best suited to fulfill your customer’s needs, it reduces the need to further escalate or pass the call to any other operator to resolve the query, and this in turn considerably improves First Call Resolution.
4. Improves Customer Satisfaction Score With Survey Analysis.
A post-interaction IVR survey helps deliver better satisfaction levels if the Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score. With IVR systems, necessary training or reward points can be implemented based on the agent’s score.
5. Supports More than Just Query Resolution
Different business uses IVR systems for multiple uses for enhanced customer services. Some of the notable tasks that can be accomplished through IVR are:
- Account balance check
- Order detail check or order cancellations.
- Can auto-pull account information from a business central repository and accept credit/debit cards for payments. This requires no call/agent assistance
- Helps with change/update of PINs and passwords
- Helps collect customer feedback at the end of the call for analysis and service improvement
6. Enables Customized Messages and Prompts.
IVR allows you to customize your call recordings, greetings, messages and prompts for a more personalized customer experience. This customization helps your business trigger different emotions and create a better brand persona.
It also helps your business to create a specific brand tone (like formal, informal, comic, vernacular, English, etc.). Additionally, if you are apprehensive about using your voice for pre-recorded messages, IVR systems offer you pre-recorded, highly professional IVR messages.
7. Automates Mundane Tasks to Enhance Productivity.
Approximately, 2/3rd of office workers, across the globe, feel overworked by repeated chores that could be automated. Maintaining employee morale can be challenging when dealing with such mundane tasks in addition to complicated problems. Ultimately, this has a negative impact on output and effectiveness.
By automating tasks such as order status checks, FAQs, cancellations, etc. through your IVR, you free your agents from mundane tasks so that they can focus instead on conversations that require true empathy and sensitivity instead.
Thanks to advances in NLP (Natural language processing) the speech-based IVR market is expanding. This technology offers the power of a conversational AI to answer customer queries and take care of level-one queries without any human intervention.
9. Data-Driven Call Handling.
IVR systems collect your caller data based on their IVR menu choices, history, and their profile. Also, it automates the identifying procedure to help your call agents be fully prepared before taking the call.
While the caller remains on hold or in the ACD queue, your IVR system enables them to enter their information. These elements improve customer satisfaction by making a caller’s engagement with your company enjoyable. Since the data also reveals any other related issues of the past or customers’ purchasing patterns,it also offers agents the opportunity to successfully close cross/up-selling offers.
Multiple IVR Systems to Choose From.
IVR systems were intimidating in the past because of their complexity and expensive nature. Businesses had to install, operate, and host their own IVR software on specialized hardware. Additionally, they required experts to set up and manage the systems. IVR became rigid, challenging to scale, and expensive for smaller firms as a result of all of these factors.
But today, IVR systems can be cloud-based and independent of on-premises infrastructure. These cloud-based, easy-to-integrate IVR systems are highly preferred by modern contact centers as it offers flexibility. Businesses scale up or down as necessary to handle call volume, changing features and capabilities along their operations.
Conclusion
It’s evident that an efficient IVR system saves contact centers a considerable amount of money & drastically improves agent productivity. Modern IVRs use ML and NLP algorithms to further speed up responses and cut down on waiting time dramatically.
Look for a modern IVR solution that offers an interactive, fully customizable IVR system. with auto-attendants, self-service, smart call routing, etc. And the additional ability to run outbound campaigns as well.
Use this kind of flexible, robust IVR system to deliver a tailored, transformative experience that’s unique to each customer.
