IVR
How Not To Break the Momentum Of Your IVR Services
Except for someone who has not used a telephone for years, each one of us has dealt with a voice response system at some point in time. Nowadays, we also receive automated calls from companies who are advertising their products. A few years back, telemarketing services were limited to a person who made a personal call to you. However, the innovative Interactive Voice Response System is more efficient than any other service. Everything takes place within seconds. You can send a pre-recorded sales advertisement to thousands of customers without much of human intervention! Therefore, one cannot ignore the contribution made by IVR in the field of marketing and advertising.
At present, it is an everyday activity for companies to allow voice recordings start the interaction with customers. An increase in volume of customers has added to the popularity of IVR systems. With companies struggling to juggle between customer service and acquisition of new customers, Interactive Voice Response seems to be something that has come to their rescue in the time of need!
As a method of self-service, IVR facilitates cost reduction and offers improved assistance to callers. In general, a customer is given the message that his call could be recorded for training purpose. This is followed by a list of options. Often customers who are faced with some kind of emergency get pissed off with such a service. Well, any company in this world does not have a magical wand that can be waved to solve all the problems. However, IVR services generally force people to go through a long process that forces people to pull their hair by the time the call ends.
While companies are doing a lot to adapt themselves to the latest technologies, they are doing a little to make sure that the customer is actually being helped. This is the reason prioritization has become the need of the hour. We cannot deny the fact that an efficiently designed IVR system is a valuable resource. However, an incapable IVR reflects poorly on the customer service of a company. The biggest challenge that is being faced by a contemporary business organization is the diversion of repeatable/non-value calls through the use of IVR. Simultaneously, a company also needs to focus on genuine/non-repeated calls to a call center or the support staff.
Everything in this world can either be right or wrong. Likewise, we can either use IVR development services the right way or the wrong way. You may not accept this, but as someone at the receiving end of an automated phone service, you can understand what customers face.
Pointers For Designing an efficient call flow for your IVR Services
- Planning: Every process starts with its foundation. Nothing works better for your IVR than an outline or flow chart. You need to plan and imagine a situation where a customer would call up. All this starts much before the creation of actual IVR. Proper planning at the very beginning would help you avoid confusions and last-minute changes.
- Put yourself in the shoes of your customers: What is the harm in thinking like a customer? After all, you would have also experienced the same sometime in life. Create as many hypothetical situations for yourself as you can. Why would a customer call an inbound call center? Remember that you have to think like a customer at every level.
- Added benefits: It is often observed that majority of IVR hosting services are designed in such a manner that the call automatically gets disconnected if the customer does not use one of the given options. Well, the goal of IVR services is enabling a reduction in the number of calls that is handled by your employees; however, the requirements of a customer are not fulfilled at times. In this situation, you can provide your callers with a reasonable alternative. You can either ask the caller to leave a voice message or allow the caller to talk to somebody else. This adds to the satisfaction of customers because they feel that their efforts have not gone in vain.
- Success lies in simplicity: Always keep in mind that any kind of IVR is not capable of doing everything under the Sun. This is the reason you should not try to do all that is possible. Your customer might get lost in the way if you try to do many things simultaneously. Do not forget the options that need to be made available to your customer.
- Clarity is the core: A customer who is calling you up has a query or a problem that needs to be addressed. Your customer might already be worried at the time of the call. This is the reason you should keep your message short and simple. It becomes difficult for a customer to comprehend a long message. No one is blessed with such a sharp memory that understands everything at once. The recorded message that a customer hears should be in the usual, everyday language. Avoid technical jargons as far as possible.
- Use of common commands: Every customer of yours is not blessed with a smartphone or the most efficient gadgets. Therefore, make your instructions user-friendly. Restrict the use of keys to the number keys or the commonly available keys.
- Repeated testing: You need to test the flow of calls at every step of the procedure. Imagine all the possible situations that a customer can go through. You can also ask other people to try the IVR hosting services.
Remember, there is always a scope for improvement. This is the reason you cannot sit back and relax even when everything is fine. Your system needs to be monitored on a regular basis. Moreover, you also need to ensure that the right thing is being offered to the customer at the right time. Ask your employees to take feedbacks from your customers on a regular basis. Last, but not the least, the design and implementation of IVR needs to be an incessant process!
Want more on IVR Solutions? Discover and learn more about call center software by exploring blog posts, whitepapers and more on our call center resource page. For comparisons of the best IVR solutions, download Business-Software.com’s Top 10 IVR Software report.
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Alicia Gray
Expert Online Journal Editor | Real Estate Investor