Subscribe to the blog and receive recommendations to boost your CX
With the variety of digital channels through which a customer can communicate with a company, Is it still working IVR in 2020?
Of course it is! The telephone continues to be the most used channel for contact between customers and brands, and therefore The role of IVRs (from English “Interactive Voice Response”) remains central to providing an optimal experience to those who contact us by telephone.
The fundamental thing to keep in mind is, precisely, Maintain the optimal experience before an increasingly demanding customer who demands immediate solutions. In fact, according to studies, almost 80% of consumers today prefer to solve their management alone instead of interacting with an agent. then The objective of the IVR, whether incoming or outgoing, must be more than ever to facilitate self-service management. And no, as is still the case in some companies, overwhelming you with an infinite number of options that are impossible to follow and that cause the customer to end up abandoning the call.
Today the advances in voice technologies, integration with systems and artificial intelligence allow us to increase the possibilities of IVR to empower customers with more options for self-service. And at the same time, optimize the work of agents by automating part of the care.
👉 READ MORE: THE FOUR STEPS TO IMPLEMENT AN IVR
Five trends to consider when building an effective IVR
1) Add value to your IVR
An IVR can work simply as a pre-care system, which transfers calls to the corresponding internal number. But it can also go several steps further and resolve customer inquiries or requests without the need to transfer the call.
Current technologies allow capture data and integrate it with company systems from the IVR. In this way, in addition, when the user calls again, there is no need to repeat their data, since the system connects them to their telephone number.
They can even be configured Dynamic IVRs, which instead of providing a pre-set menu of options, go modifying their behavior in real time, without interrupting the service provided to the customer.
The designs of the IVR flows will depend on the service needs of each company and contact center. The important thing is create custom applications that truly energize service and business processes, and that resolve the case at the first contact, ensuring customer satisfaction. Whether they want to contact a specific department or they want to place an order as quickly as possible.
2) Use vocal technologies to provide conversational attention
One of the most innovative ways to provide value to customers who interact with the IVR is to incorporate voice technologies such as Vocalization of text (TTS — Text To Speech), automatic voice recognition (ASR — Automatic Speech Recognition) or voice biometric identification. These technologies make the IVR far from the inflexible traditional menus (where if we press a wrong digit we must start over, for example) and they give more naturalness to the interaction. In addition, they make it so that the customer does not have to choose a default option that may not fit what they need, and can specifically express their query.
The most advanced technology in this regard are the cognitive voice portals: these are telephone bots that interpret the natural language with which users communicate and provide more humanized and closer attention than conventional IVR. But even if an artificial intelligence bot is not applied, the trend is to give a conversational tone to the interaction, and that should be in the focus when building the IVR.
3) Integrate the IVR with other systems
For the IVR to have a high degree of case resolution and to function as a self-service terminal (something much appreciated by younger customers), it is essential tightly integrate the IVR with company data and applications, from the CRM Until the billing system. In this way, customers have access to a wide range of self-managed options, from consulting their invoices or account statements, requesting credit authorization, proceeding with a procedure or even making a transfer between accounts, all from the IVR, without waiting online.
Of course, will there be cases in which the intervention of an agent will be necessary and valuable. When the IVR is well implemented, a pre-care instance is carried out where data is collected so that Operator care is more agile and efficient. This reduces speaking time and increases team productivity, while the customer has an omnichannel, smooth and uninterrupted contact experience.
4) Make the most of every second online
Few things more frustrating for a customer than waiting in line. Even when the customer is told what the estimated wait time is, those minutes can seem like hours.
To take advantage of them, you can replace typical instrumental background music with valuable information for the customer, about new releases or available offers (and if the selection of this content is based on the customer's profile, much the better). Perhaps that call could be resolved by accessing the company's web platform: mention it in the recording of your IVR and encourage digital self-management.
5) Analyze data to improve processes and get to know the customer
Just as it's important to analyze call and chat reports in the contact center, so is it important to look into specific IVR data. IVR reports allow us to know in depth the behavior of customers before these systems., what are the most requested options, the most problematic abandonment points and the average times of each interaction, among other data.
Analyzing them allows make progress in the constant improvement of care processes, eliminating unnecessary steps and evaluating new features to increase customer satisfaction. But in addition to these general reports, analytics provides valuable customer data for, for example, Predict their intentions before they express it. For this, the IVR information must be integrated with that of other contact channels and digital media.
For example, if the customer receives an SMS with an overdue payment date, the IVR may tell them to first contact the collections section. Or if you left your details on a landing page for a certain product, an outgoing IVR will propose an offer related to that product. Reduce customer effort and optimize agents' work is the horizon that new trends in IVRs point to in the digital age.
Discover inConcert technology to take your contact center to another level, applying the latest trends in automation.
