Businesses nowadays understand that providing better customer service to customers can drastically impact their growth. Due to which they have started incorporating advanced technologies in their organisation. One such advanced feature used by majority businesses is IVR.
IVR expands to Interactive Voice Response, a service that automates the telephony system. It allows a pre-recorded voice to interact with customers and track response through DTMF inputs via the keypad. It responds to the inbound calls automatically and interacts with the customers through pre-recorded voice messages.
IVR gives you pre-defined outputs based on your limited inputs. When any customer calls on your business phone number, the IVR system greets them with a pre-recorded welcome message. This greeting message includes the name of the company, along with a list of IVR menu options. Based on the customer’s selection, the call is further redirected to different department and agents.
IVR menu options are fully customisable and handled by the company as per the needs. These options help the customers to resolve their queries or express their concerns without interacting with a live agent. If you’re an enterprise with many departments, your IVR can have below options:
- Press 1 for Sales Related Issues
- Press 2 for Product Enquiries
- Press 3 for Billing Related Queries
These options help you deliver the best-in-class customer service where every customer feels acknowledged. Below mentioned are a few ways through which IVR can help you reach your customer service potential.
1. Increases Customer Support Availability
Companies can deploy IVR for their business to ensure no calls from customers are left unanswered. If you cannot provide 24*7 customer support due to the shortage of human resources, then IVR is what you need. This solution increases your hours of availability by providing you with the off-business hours’ connectivity.
For instance, when a customer calls your business during after-business hours, you can play an audio recording to inform the callers of your unavailability and direct their queries to voicemail.
2. Effective Feedback Tool
Taking customer feedback after the call is an extraordinary thought put in by businesses to understand a customer’s perspective. However, few clients might not be comfortable giving feedback straightforward to the agent. This is where IVR helps.
After a customer is finished conversing with an agent, IVR prompts them to give feedback via DTMF tones on the keypad. This feedback is related to the company products, agent interaction or the resolution quality. Through IVR, customers can express their concerns truthfully without disrespecting any agent.
3. Provides Self-Service
As the famous saying goes,
Simplicity is the key
So, it is preferred to keep call routing strategies as simple as possible with an end goal to not baffle the client with complicated menu options. These options provided by the IVR are clear and concise, which can easily handle customer queries.
This means you don’t need to route the customer’s call to the agents for basic queries which IVR self-help options can quickly answer. These options elevate your customer service quality and minimise customer’s dependency over agents.
4. Records Customer Conversation
Importance of call recording feature in the IVR solution is indispensable in today’s customer service scenario. It is a powerful application which is being cohesively used with the IVR to improve call management.
The customer’s call is recorded for monitoring purposes so that you always have a check on the kind of conversation which goes between your customer and agent. This helps to provide enhanced customer service, so that customer’s queries are resolved at the earliest.
5. Routes Call Efficiently
IVR is an efficient tool for directing customers to the right agents for query resolution. It directs the calls to the departments based on the input provided. Customers can also skip the IVR options that they don’t need.
For instance, a client wants to talk to an agent regarding billing issues. In such cases, IVR efficiently routes the customer’s call to the agent of billing department by taking response from the customer. This eliminates the need of a dedicated workforce to route these calls manually.
6. Promotes Marketing Campaign
Savvy advertisers realise that inbound calls are a prime opportunity to promote a special offer or convey an important message to the customers.
When a customer calls a business to resolve a query, the IVR can broadcast the ongoing offers or discount schemes to lure the customers. After the offer announcement, IVR can serve the customers as per their choice.
7. Reduces Customer’s Effort
With IVR’s self-help options, customers do not need to wait in the queue for their calls to be answered.
These options eliminate the customer’s effort of talking to the agent for basic queries like balance enquiry or subscription renewals. According to the customer’s response, IVR fetches the relevant information from the database.
Final Words
For business, customer service is everything. Thus, organisations must do every possible bit to keep their customers happy, and services like IVR helps to achieve the same.
Figuring out how to enhance customer service and engage clients over a call is crucial for any customer support team. IVR is one such phenomenal service that helps you ensure your customers receive the quality service they deserve. Thus, IVR service is a must-have thing for businesses looking to establish themselves as a brand and deliver the best customer service.
Are you thinking to deploy an IVR solution for your business?
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