Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology enables incoming callers to access information without speaking to an agent. This is done through a system of pre-recorded messages and is suitable for simple, high-volume interactions.
Callers can also access menu options through a keypad selection or via speech recognition to route their call straight to a specific department or appropriate agent. A well-designed IVR solution can yield enormous operational benefits for a contact centre, while also significantly enhancing the customer experience.
The technology empowers customers to solve their own queries immediately and without assistance (reducing costs and improving service), while also enabling quick and efficient routing to the best-suited agent to address a specific query (boosting first call resolution and CX).
We have partnered with Enghouse Interactive to provide businesses with a solution that has all the advanced features of an enterprise self-service IVR tightly integrated with a contact centre solution. It incorporates recognition engines and voice synthesis, text to speech, automatic voice recognition and extensive reporting to create a fully automated and intelligent voice self-service solution for the contact centre.
When is IVR required?
Our standard contact centre solution comes with an auto attendant and dual-tone multi-signal frequency (DTMF) built in. This is capable of handling the simplest of interactions, such as checking an account balance or order status through selecting an option in the telephony menu.
IVR is required in situations where advanced features such as text to speech or automated speech recognition is a requirement. For example, you will require IVR if you need a self-service option that includes voice synthesizer capabilities to play back account information to the customer. Similarly this applies to scenarios where voice recognition is required to select a menu option in the self-service solution.
Speech recognition offers a greater depth of functionality and significantly improves the customer experience over traditional IVR solutions.
Challenges
High levels of customer frustration
Since calls are often anonymously routed to the next available agent, they are often transferred multiple times before a query can be resolved, resulting in high levels of customer frustration and poor CX.
Confusing menu options
Customers are often presented with numerous IVR menu options when they phone a contact centre. Many of these options are not applicable and take a long time to wade through.
Customer queues
Contact centres struggle to manage high call volumes during peak periods, leaving customers waiting in long queues and without the option to request a call back.
Lack of reporting
A lack of reporting can hinder a contact centre’s ability to determine the effectiveness of an IVR solution.
Benefits
Enhance the customer experience
- Use any data source to personalise the IVR menu to only include options that are relevant to your customers.
- Provide advanced self-service options through a voice channel. Speech can be used to trigger specific actions and convey customer specific information to service customers more efficiently.
- Increase first call resolution (FCR), decrease average handling time (AHT) and reduce unnecessary transfers by using data-based routing to ensure that customers reach the agent best suited to assist.
- Reduce customer frustration by managing high call volumes better – convey wait times to the customer, position in the queue or ask customers to leave a number for a call back.
Reduce costs
- Once the system is set up, additional incremental costs are negligible (irrespective of the volume of requests).
- Simple queries are no longer handled by agents, reducing the cost of service.
- An IVR solution is designed to automatically field a high volume of queries, enabling the contact centre to service more queries at a lower cost.
Use insight to drive business improvements
- How many customers are dropping off during an IVR interaction and when? How long are customers waiting in the queue? What are the most popular options? Use reports and dashboards to interpret this and other IVR interaction data to gain business insights and drive enhancements.
Future proof your technology investment
- Open integration points and architecture enables you to leverage prior investments in hardware, software and solution development, while providing a smooth migration path to the emerging standards and technologies that will be required in the future.
Key features
The IVR solution can operate as part of our contact centre solution or as an add on to your existing contact centre. Please refer to the intelligent routing module for information on additional, more advanced features.
Key features
The IVR solution can operate as part of our contact centre solution or as an add on to your existing contact centre. Please refer to the intelligent routing module for information on additional, more advanced features.
Typical ROI
A return on investment can be realised through all or any combination of the below.
01
By ensuring that customers are routed to the individual best suited to handle the query, a significant reduction in AHT and cost of service is realised.
02
Using self-service to field basic queries reduces agent workload and saves a significant amount of money.
03
Providing a more personalised IVR interaction in combination with self-service improves the customer experience.
