Interactive Voice Response - What is IVR?
The meaning of interactive voice response
What is IVR?
Interactive voice response or IVR refers to business phone system technology that helps callers achieve their objective through an automated voice menu. It uses the caller’s phone keypad or voice response to understand what they need and offer viable solutions.
Depending on how the caller responds, the IVR can perform either one of the following actions: provide the information needed or route callers to individuals within the organization who can offer more nuanced assistance.
When a person dials a business phone number, there’s a very good chance that their call will be answered by a pre-recorded message that includes a series of options. This automated greeting and menu would be the interactive voice response.
That is what gives customers and the computer-powered phone system the power to “talk” to each other so the call’s purpose can be determined and the situation could be handled accordingly.
Performing transactions through interactive voice response
What is an IVR used for?
IVRs are typically used in contact centres or phone systems for business to route calls based on choices callers make in response to an automated menu. Every answer a person delivers can help the system understand what the caller wants help with— for example, they may want to:
- Clarify a charge they incurred with the billing department
- Get troubleshooting assistance from the technical support team, or
- Reach a salesperson who can guide them through an upgrade process
It may also be used to share information with customers who choose to reach the company by phone. These can include instructions, technical updates, or promotional announcements. In some cases, the caller will be told that the system will record calls for quality assurance—giving them the choice to end the interaction if they don’t want to be recorded or press forward if they’re fine with it.
Interactive voice response was traditionally used to coordinate queuing in call centres. But IVR systems have evolved considerably since then. These days, they are mainly used for automating simple processes—ultimately giving callers self-service options. This way, questions and issues that are easy to resolve won’t need to take up time and resources from call centre agents who should be handling more complex cases.
Some of the self-service processes covered by IVR today are:
- Password reset
- Account balance checking
- Information lookup (pricing information, organizational directory, etc)
- Reviewing account details
- Survey or contest participation
- Conducting minor transactions (fund transfers, payments, and the like)
What is IVR payment?
IVR payment is a function that allows customers to use phone calls to pay their bills, fees, and other charges they might have incurred. This works through the integration of an IVR system with third-party payment gateway apps—this is a technology that includes security and compliance measures that protect sensitive information the customer needs to share over the telephone.
Interactive voice response technology
How does an IVR work?
Way back when IVR technology was first used by companies and call centres, setting it up was not easy at all.
Every component you needed for old-school interactive voice response to work eats up financial resources. Even more painful, you weren’t even sure if you could make the following work together with your existing infrastructure:
- IVR software. This isn’t a standard functionality in a communications platform (whether you’re using an on-premise or cloud-based phone system). It needed its own PSTN service or VoIP phone system to function, as well as its own hardware.
- A database (from which information can be pulled by the system).
- An infrastructure that’s capable of supporting several servers, dedicated to this technology alone.
We haven’t even brought up the fact that you needed to have a separate computer with a telephony card—custom hardware that allows you to integrate additional hardware components into the PC—on which you can install the interactive voice response or IVR software.
Sounds complicated, right? That’s why companies had to put specialists on the payroll to set up and configure the technology. Further complicating matters is the proprietary programming language these systems tend to have.
But things are different now thanks to cloud computing.
Cloud contact centre solutions available today (like RingCentral) already have interactive voice response, sometimes known as voice portals, incorporated into their platform. The telephony, the databases, and the servers you need to make IVR work are on the cloud and are handled by the provider.
Consider how different this is from how it used to be -
- Getting separate software is no longer required.
- Building an in-house infrastructure won’t be an issue.
- Hiring specialists who have no other job apart from managing and maintaining is no longer needed.
Essentially, you won’t spend as much money as you would with traditional IVRs.
And remember: it’s already part of your communications solution. This means that you won’t have to worry whether it’ll work seamlessly with adjacent features such as automatic call distribution (ACD). They’re part of the same ecosystem—they were designed to work together.
To further illustrate the point, see how a simple IVR usually works with other call centre features:
- When a call is picked up by the phone system, it will be greeted by an auto-attendant.
- The IVR is then initiated and deploys a phone menu so the caller can navigate the phone system using either dual-tone multi-frequency tones (DTMF tones) or voice response through speech recognition.
Quick Note:
DTMF is basically the use of a phone’s touch-tone keypad to respond to IVR systems. A lot of systems still use this today, although newer cloud-based contact centres include the option for voice response through speech recognition—an innovation that gives people to ability to respond to the IVR with their own voice. - With every choice the caller makes, the IVR receives information which determines whether an issue can be addressed through a self-service process or requires human intervention.
- If the said issue is simple and can be resolved through a rote procedure, then self-service is initiated
- If the said issue is complex, then the interactive voice response system sorts the call for deployment to an available qualified agent care of automatic call distribution (ACD).
Important Note:
When the IVR uses the information it gathers to put calls into buckets or categories, it’s known as the qualification phase. With skills-based routing, IVR allows for the system to identify a live agent who is capable of handling a given caller’s concerns. This is possible thanks to pre-defined protocols you can set up for your ACD.
When you have all these capabilities available in one contact centre solution, transitioning from one function to the next is frictionless.
The interactive voice response phone tree
What is an IVR menu?
The IVR menu is a system made up of recorded options and instructions that gives callers guidance in their IVR experience. The callers are led through a series of choices that helps the contact centre’s technologies determine the best possible resolution to a given issue.
Most people are familiar with this thanks to a script often used in these systems:
“Press 1 for customer service”
“Please state your billing number”
Depending on how it was set up, a caller could be asked to use their voice or the touch-tone dialpads of their phones to respond.
Sometimes, the menu has multiple levels. This is why some people call it a “phone tree” (it “branches out” with each response). Depending on their answer, a caller can be sent to a secondary menu that leads to tertiary menus. The number of levels your IVR has depends on how you choose to design it.
Ideally, your IVR menu shouldn’t be overly complicated. A phone tree with too many options or branches can be overwhelming to the average customer or client. Try to think about what your company needs and what your callers might need, then go from there.
Interactive voice response system dashboard
How do you set up an interactive voice response?
Setting up an IVR these days can be a breeze provided that it is part of a cloud-based call centre solution. If you’re still thinking of taking the traditional route, you’re only setting yourself up for a major headache—so we recommend going with a provider that leverages cloud technology.
One good example is RingCentral. Even people who don’t know the first thing about programming can use its contact centre solution to design an interactive voice menu.
A browser-based drag-and-drop interface lets you customize the IVR platform as needed. Because there’s a visual component to this, virtually anyone can adjust the call flow in a way that best suits your processes. No need to pay a specialist to do it for you. So that’s one item off your operational costs and you still take your quality of service to the next level.
Interactive voice response - advantages
What are the benefits of IVR?
IVR, when it’s part of your contact centre toolset, leads to some really good benefits and advantages for businesses such as:
Better customer service
To many, making a phone call for the sake of getting customer service can be an exercise in frustration.
- The waiting time for an available live agent can take up to an hour (or more) on occasion.
- A caller can be put on hold frequently or for an extended period of time if the agent isn’t capable of addressing a given concern.
- If they’re (un)lucky, the call will be transferred from one department to another in the hopes that one would have all the answers the customer needs.
- Unluckier still, they can go through all of this and still not getting a satisfying resolution.
Not having a helpful IVR system does this.
When you’re designing your IVR menu each element needs to have a purpose. If it turns out that it’s incapable of resolving something for the caller through simple means, it needs to have a flow that helps it understand why a person called. That way, it can reliably qualify the call so it will be forwarded to an appropriately skilled agent.
The ultimate goal here is first contact resolution (FCR). When you achieve this, you get happier customers; they’ll feel like their time and money are well-spent on you and your offerings.
A highly customizable system will help you align your brand’s messaging with the IVR interactions your customers have with your phone systems. Think about how you can adjust your company greetings and phone menu depending on your key campaigns.
You can make it work even better when you integrate it with the customer relationship management (CRM) system of your choice, using Open RestFull APIs.
With a CRM solution, you can match the caller’s phone number or account number with a customer profile that’s already in your system. This allows the IVR to personalize the experience by addressing the caller with their first name. The more personalized the experience is, the more goodwill you’ll inspire in the customer.
If you happen to serve multiple territories that speak different languages you can program the IVR menu to address them. This makes it easier for callers who aren’t comfortable speaking in English (the standard language of businesses).
Projection of levelled up professionalism
If you really think about it, the hardware and infrastructure you used to need to make IVR systems function had been expensive enough without considering the other expenses needed to maintain and sustain it. So it’s not a surprise that there’s a lingering impression of it being exclusive to enterprise-level communications suite—the kind only conglomerates could afford.
Thanks to the cloud, even small businesses and medium-sized enterprises can have IVR capabilities baked into their communications. Because these robust solutions don’t have to be on-premise, they’re much more affordable.
Even better is the fact that cloud-based communications often have more advanced and user-friendly capabilities than traditional options. This means you can project enterprise-level professionalism on a modest budget, helping you minimize cost while maximizing your growth potential.
Improved agent performance and morale
You’re not replacing your call centre agents when you get IVR. In fact, you’re making life much easier for them.
Having IVR means you can automate simple services like account balance confirmation or password updates. When your agents don’t have to handle repetitive requests that don’t challenge their skills, they get more time to tackle and focus on more complex cases.
When there are a lot of inbound calls without an IVR effectively filtering them, agents can get frustrated and burnt out from tasks or issues that could have just been addressed through automation.
These small things add up, and when they do, your staff will inevitably deliver poor service. Their poor performance will lead to dissatisfaction and stress, which can ultimately result in high turnover.
If you deploy an intelligently-designed IVR that addresses simpler requests, you cut down the number of calls handled by agents. Implement this with skill-based routing, and your agents won’t receive calls they’re not equipped for.
Efficient and productive call centre agents are, on the whole, happier and perform better.
24/7 availability
One of the great things about IVR is that it generally only needs one thing from humans for it to work: programming. Outside of the initial setup process and the occasional reconfiguration, it can continue to operate exactly the way you need it to.
To put it simply, it doesn’t have to stop and rest. Customers can call you anytime—at the crack of dawn, at midnight, while the majority of the office is on a team-building holiday—and an automated message will greet them. It can even help callers process simple transactions if you’d programmed it to do that.
Reduced manual errors
Being automated, the interactive voice response system is not prone to making errors. This is in contrast to having all the inbound calls to your company handled by a human receptionist.
High call volumes can be overwhelming for any person. Needing to manually handle all those incoming calls increases the risk of making mistakes. Think about it: wouldn’t you get flustered with about 20 calls coming in at once? It wouldn’t be hard to imagine routing calls incorrectly under those circumstances.
Equipping your contact centre with an IVR system helps you make sure that all calls follow a uniform sequence care of your phone menu programming. There will be fewer call handling errors if humans were allowed to make fewer judgment calls every time a customer tries to reach out to them by phone.
When your IVR experience is made consistent for callers through automation, you can rest easy in the knowledge that callers consistently get the service they need.
Interactive voice response applications
What is IVR’s role in customer experience?
IVR could be the first point of contact between a person and your company. This means it can set the tone of a customer’s relationship with your brand. And when you consider how customer experience is based on the overall quality of every exposure an individual has to your company, you’d be hard-pressed to not remember that first impressions can definitely last.
In short: the customer needs to have a positive experience with you. Before you get loyal customers, they need to be happy customers first. If you want to have brand ambassadors that boost your chances of attracting more customers, endeavour to ensure people are pleased with your products and services.
So how does an IVR help you with that?
If you structure your IVR system in a way that that quickly and painlessly addresses queries, it’s much easier to win customers over and gain their trust.
There are many ways to use this to your organisation’s advantage. Here are a few ways positive customer experiences can be created through RingCentral’s IVR feature.
Self-service transactions and processes
Want a surefire way to improve customer satisfaction? Give the customer what they need ASAP.
One approach is to help customers get answers without having to rely on a human agent. You can provide automated self-service options for customers who only want to complete simple processes and transactions with IVR. No available agents? No problem. The system makes it so they won’t need to wait for someone to pick up the call.
With the agents only handling complex cases that the IVR can’t cover, processes can be streamlined and optimized to the benefit of your business.
Efficient skills-based call routing
Interactive voice response also makes it easier for agents to deliver great customer experience.
When an agent is only sent calls that they’re able to handle, they can resolve more issues more quickly and ultimately offer more (and better) help to more callers.
With this intelligent routing feature, cloud contact centres offer organisations the ability to associate strengths and skillsets with individual call centre agents.
To illustrate: the IVR menu options qualifies the calls during the qualification phase so the system could understand why a person has made that phone call. From there, it can determine the skills an agent might need to address the concern.
After being qualified, the call is routed to an appropriately skilled agent by way of the automatic call distribution (ACD).
There’s little chance of an agent getting a case that they can’t competently address in this scenario. When this happens, you’re also minimising the risk of giving customers a negative experience.
Speech recognition and natural language processing
Advanced IVR gives you more than the option to use touch-tone keypad selection for guiding callers through your system.
Some contact centre solutions these days let you enable speech recognition technology, uses natural language processing. This is especially helpful for customers with visual impairments or anyone else who might have trouble using the telephone touchpads.
Side note:
Speech recognition technology is not conversational AI. Conversational AI more in line with messaging apps and chatbots. Speech recognition is more focused on picking up keywords from the caller’s voice to qualify their call.
Business hours
You can also program different IVR sequences based on your company’s work hours. This is a great way to set customer expectations in terms of your availability.
Let’s say you have limited manpower after office hours. You can program different phone menus for callers who reach you during that time. You can limit the menu to self-service options. Or you can just play a message asking people to leave a voicemail or call in the morning instead.
When you do this, your customers will know that they won’t be able to get the same level of service at that time versus during official hours.
Integrations with different apps
RingCentral and similar providers let you use open RestFull APIs to integrate interactive voice response with many business applications. This expands the scope of possibilities for you to improve efficiency through IVR. Among other things:
- A customer relationship management or CRM integration gives the IVR access to more information, meaning more data points for classifying customer calls which in turn improves the chances of matching queries to qualified agents.
- Integrations with back-office system enable the interactive voice response system to deliver updates and details to customer concerning their accounts (think purchases or transactions) without the need to rely on a live agent
- Payment gateway integrations allow customers to make automated payment and other transactions over the phone.