How Is IVR Effective In Call Centre Industry

Call centre is designed to handle centralised support by facilitating communication in every nook and corner of the world. It handles a large volume of requests by telephone.

Nowadays, with the spread of technology and mobile phones, it has raised awareness. Billions of people are looking forward to call centres in order to get prompt support. And these numbers are escalating every day. Inbound calls make the most of the communication in any call centre.

These calls are operated by a company to administer incoming product inquiries, provide technical support as well as perform market research. Interactive Voice Response abbreviated as IVR manages most of the inbound calls and customer conversation in the call centre. It identifies and segments the call to effectively attend the incoming calls. Moreover, it helps the call centre to handle a daily quota of the large volume of calls.  

Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) and Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) technologies support the IVR system in call answering and distribution. These systems provide an effective communication channel to handle call centre communication.

Challenges Faced by a Call Centre

Call centre receives countless calls every day and attending all the calls with equal zeal and enthusiasm is a difficult deal for agents. Below is a list of challenges call centres have to undergo while handling customer calls.

• Services should be provided throughout the day ensuring round the clock availability. It is one of the priority services offered by a call centre.
• Number of staff to calls ratio is low and hence dealing with them poses great difficulty.
• Due to heavy call traffic, there might be a high waiting time in long queues leading to a large number of unattended calls.
• Lack of trained and skilful staff to handle calls efficiently maximising First Call Resolution (FCR).

Understanding the Usage of IVR in a Call Centre

IVR is expanding the reach of business to over a million customers, counting across different countries, spanning over different time spans. Call centres are a beaming industry within the heart of communication. Some of the functionalities include:

• Ensuring quick service and a stronger bond with the customer. IVR provides a customised voice message and a wide range of information that the customer might seek to find the answers to their query. Since the messages are customisable, it gives a personalised touch to the caller.
• Used for collecting feedback; this ensures with an immediate effect that the customer is satisfied over a provided specific service or not.
• Ensuring exceptional customer service experience; the call centre’s main objective is to accelerate the process of query resolution by presenting self-help and connect to a live agent option.
• IVR can reduce the frustration of the callers/customers by transferring the calls in case of their unavailability in the office.
• Important work of IVR is to provide an interactive system where the conversation between the customers can happen effortlessly. It is transferred to the most appropriate agent based on the caller’s input. This is very helpful in saving time and connecting to the right call centre agent and also ensuring overall satisfaction.
• If the caller is facing a basic problem which does not require any conversation with the agent, then it can be easily handled by the customer on their own with self-service options.
• Using call priority option in IVR, customers can be prioritised, and an existing customer with an on-going or already raised issue will be prioritised in comparison to a new caller.
• IVR ensures no call is unanswered. Moreover, if an agent is busy, it helps in reconnecting the call to a different agent. This is to ensure customers are being acknowledged without waiting much longer in call queues.
• ACD integration in the IVR guarantees that customer calls are routed using the most optimised routing structure ensuring that customers get a quality customer service.

Benefits Of IVR In A Call Center

• The representative receives calls of his domain and specialisation. Thus, it makes the agent efficient as they can their deliver best results in such a scenario.
• The agent will be able to resolve the queries easier and faster with IVR-CRM integration.
• IVR helps in reducing the number of calls attended by agents without compromising on process efficiency.
• Promptly attending calls, delivering quality service, and knowledgable tips to resolve the issues scales up the company’s brand in multiple business spectrums.
• IVR can reduce the operating cost by reducing the number of call attendees required by using virtual receptionist and self-help options; this could reduce the investment required in hiring professionals, training and fine-tuning the services offered that can’t be negotiated.

An IVR system helps in eliminating the contemporary technique of human receptionists. Owing to a large number of calls that a call centre has to focus upon, a human receptionist can be vastly ineffective for the process. So human efforts are greatly reduced using the IVR services. Hence, IVR is one of the most helpful assisted techniques available for the call centres to handle the call rates efficiently and in a better way.

If you are looking to invest in an IVR service, contact our sales team today at 1800-120-4132.