What Is IVR And Should You Get One For Your Call Center?

When you’re running a call center, you’re trying to strike that delicate balance between ensuring that your agents are always working at maximum capacity while still ensuring stellar customer service.

If you’ve ever had a bad customer experience, you know how you’d wish the call center owner would just hire more people to support the demand for the services.

Fortunately, making sure that you balance your interests with customer satisfaction is made much easier (and cheaper) with a technology called Interactive Voice Response or IVR. This is one of the endless features offered by providers like Telnum to create a streamlined business communication solution for their clientele.

If you want to learn more about what IVR is, what it offers, and how it can help your business, keep reading. At the end of the article, we’ll also our opinion on whether or not you should get it.

Interactive Voice Response 101: What should you know about it?

IVR services allows enterprises like yours to maintain communication with their clientele without dedicating even one minute of human labor. Instead, it gives customers a more active role in addressing their issues and other reasons for calling.

The more common way of doing this is by having the caller respond by pressing numbers on the keypad. But if you want to go with a more advanced version, they’d be able to respond by talking.

It’s one of the more popular tools for customer service because, in a way, it empowers customers without requiring additional labor from the call center. But today, this has also been used to run promotions, surveys, and many more.

What does an IVR offer you?

In delivering the benefits associated with this tech, you will get these following service features:

Customized greetings and messages. Just because it’s automated, it doesn’t mean it should be generic. You can customize messages to reflect your brand identity.
Collect caller information. Knowing more about your caller would allow you to know why they’re calling in the first place. This makes it much easier to direct them to a solution to their issues.
Call routing. With your AI receptionist taking care of it for you, your callers can automatically be directed to the appropriate department based on the reason they’re calling.
Automated calls. If a customer completes a payment or any other relevant action, this can trigger an outbound call to serve as a notification.
Data-driven routing. When there are a lot of calls, your IVR can prioritize based on the value of the client to the business.
Call flow template. You don’t have to create the call flows from scratch because there would already be a few available for you. Depending on your needs, these may be modified as well.
Automated problem resolution. IVR lets your customers address their problems without talking to a live agent. This means that your agents can focus on more complicated issues.

IVR advantages

Because of the features mentioned in the previous section, you’ll enjoy these benefits when using IVR:

Improved customer satisfaction

Think of IVR as an additional agent that you don’t have to pay a wage. Because it takes care of the issues of some customers, callers who need to be connected to an agent can do so more quickly.

Meanwhile, those who can resolve their own problems don’t have to wait at all. The shortened problem resolution time is a sure way to improve the reputation of your business.

Decreased costs

Did you know that there’s a study that showed how using an IVR reduces the cost per contact by 500 percent? If your call center is focused on marketing a certain product or service, this would be a great help to keep your customers satisfied for less.

Plus, it also helps with labor cost efficiency because the IVR can screen all callers to only direct qualified contacts to your agents.

Get valuable customer information

As we’ve mentioned, IVR isn’t just for customer service anymore. You can also use this tool to gather more information about your customers so you can serve them better.

Information is always crucial in running a successful marketing campaign. IVR can take the load off researching so you can focus on higher-level tasks like crafting a campaign that would get the best response from your customer base.

Increase lead conversion

IVR can make calls on your behalf so you can pre-qualify potential customers based on predetermined criteria. As a result, the leads you’ll have would be of higher quality. This means a higher chance of converting leads into customers.

For your agents, this means more wins that can boost their morale!

If you run a call center, an IVR is a must-have. With its cost and efficiency advantages, you’ll be able to reach your existing goals more quickly with it.

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