4 Steps to Implement an IVR

In general, the concept of an interactive voice response system is known and used by those who work in the world of call centers. IVR is a technology that has not gone out of fashion and is still absolutely necessary to automate services and implement many of the contact center campaigns.

What is an IVR?

By its acronym in English Interactive Voice Response, is a system that, through voice messages, interacts with your customer and allows you to automate processes and services in your contact center.

With the consolidation of omnichannel strategies, self-service functions have been extrapolated to other service channels, such as livechat and the use of Chatbots, but the IVR, pure and simple as we know it, is still necessary and will continue to be so as long as the telephone channel is a valid contact channel for customers. The objectives of why you would implement a voice response system are clear and we can summarize them in three:

• give your customer a quality service, providing 24/7 access and eliminating waiting times online
• reduce operating costs, freeing up human resources
• increase the productivity of your business, by automating and optimizing processes.

But what does it mean to implement an IVR? Before getting to the point, I would like to make one last differentiation.- A IVR system is the functional module or the capacity of your contact center system to implement an IVR application. The system will allow, through a tool, the development of multiple IVR applications.- A IVR application is the automation of a business process with the tool provided by the system.- Each business process Whatever you decide to automate, it is then an IVR application that must be implemented, that is, designed and developed with a tool for creating IVRs.

1. Define IVR Type

The first thing to do is to determine the type of IVR and that involves saying if it's an incoming IVR or a Outgoing IVR.

• Un Inbound IVR It will answer calls from your customers and will process them according to the indicated flow and the functionality you have implemented. Examples of incoming IVRs would be:
  • View the statement of accounts and balances
  • Information on requirements for procedures
  • Course registrations
  • Appointment schedule
  • Balance inquiries

• Un Outgoing IVR you are going to call your client and then execute certain actions such as a voice message, a menu with options, a question and the capture of the answer, etc. If you want to know more about the IVR Salientes application, you can read “Voice Broadcasting: 12 Questions You Should Ask Your Provider”. Examples of outbound IVRs would be:
  • Invoice due notification
  • Appointment Reminders with option to cancel/modify
  • Customer Satisfaction Surveys
  • Verification of delivery of merchandise with option to transfer to the call center for claims
  • Product/Service Promotions

2. Design the process flow

The next step is design the process flow, through, for example, a flow chart

• To design the diagram you must be clear: where the process begins and when and how it ends.
• To identify what will be the main activities and sub-processes and their chronological order.
• Rather, identify the decision points to move from one activity to another.
• Identify when you should ask the customer to enter information.
• In addition to identifying when you should go to a database or other system to obtain information.
• And finally draw the diagram according to the defined chronological sequence and the established decision points.

Along with the drawing of the diagram, you must create a document with information specific that will work for the time of development. For example,

• If in the flowchart there is an activity that is “Ask for PIN”. The document must specify more details of the document, e.g.: The PIN is always 4 digits long.
• If there is an activity in the flowchart that is: “Validate user”. The document should make clarifications of the style: the user is validated by executing a stored SQL procedure that will provide Systems. To run it, you must pass it as a user ID and PIN parameter.”
• If there is an activity in the flowchart that is: “Send account statement by email”. The document goes into more detail by saying, for example, the PDFs that are generated to send the information by email to the customer, must have the following nomenclature: AccountNumber + Date + Account_Status”
• You should also list the text of the audios that need to be sent to be recorded and under what name the files should be saved, for example:

3. Validate

Once you have all the specifications made, the validation phase begins to confirm that the process you will implement through an IVR has the expected logic and meets all operational requirements.

• With the diagram, you can validate the logic of the process with the personnel of your company who know it the most at the operational level
• The specification document will help you, in addition to carrying out operational checks, to validate with system personnel or vendors of the applications with which the IVR must interact.

4. Develop

Finally, development begins on the IVR system.

Depending on the capabilities of the tool you have and what you decide at the business level, you can do the development yourself with personnel you have trained for this purpose or you can hire the implementation from your supplier.

Development involves:

• • Program it in the system
  • Test it at the functional level, to verify the logic of the process
  • Then test it at the user level, to verify the degree of usability
  • And finally, test it at a technical level, to verify that the integration with the database is working well, that the information you are providing is correct and that there are no programming errors

If you follow and iterate over these four stages and you also have a good tool for development, the success in implementing your IVR applications is guaranteed. The limit of what you can do with an IVR system is in your creativity!