Our IVR offers a host of vital and powerful benefits for all businesses and nonprofit organizations which use the phone as a part of their communications. Find out how it works as a part of your operations and the value difference it can make.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems have moved well beyond being a nice to have feature that make you look more professional or replace old receptionists, to offering essential savings and advantages which can make all the difference in traction, market share, the longevity of your venture, management burden and the profitability and value of your company. Check out what role it could play or your organization, and the best ways to use it.
Interactive Voice Response systems are a form of telephony software which routes inbound calls based on their selections. Choices are made by either touching corresponding numbers on a phone dial pad, or by voice commands. If you’ve called any company recently chances are high that you’ve interacted with some of this technology.
Our IVR software has come a long way in the past few years. Both in terms of quality and function. It is also cloud based. Just as we’ve done away with clunky and expensive old physical business phone systems and phones, so IVR has moved into the cloud too. All making it more affordable, reliable and easy to use from anywhere.
As a user of IVR you get to choose how to route calls, the commands available, and how simple to make things.
Integrating interactive voice response into your company is very easy. Using virtual phone numbers and cloud based dashboards you can craft your own system with relative ease. More complex options and patterns can be set up as desired.
The most obvious use for IVR is handling inbound customer service calls from existing customers. It can also be used to field calls from those finding your website or social profiles and wanting to do business with you.
Where IVR becomes even far more powerful and valuable is for managing inbound callbacks. This can be in tandem with TV ads, billboards and other outdoor advertising, direct mail, Google Click To Call Ads, and SMS campaigns and automated follow up text message sequences.
Of special note is the power of using IVR with RVM (Ringless Voicemail) campaigns. RVM has become a superior replacement for cold calling, warm calling, email, social media marketing and even voice broadcasts and autodialers.
Ringless voicemail is ideal for generating live inbound calls from new cold prospects, databases of existing sales leads, current and past customers responding to promotional messages, and as part of automated drip sequences to close recent inquiries.
IVR systems have been notoriously frustrating in the past. Though it seems increasingly clear that with the quality of today’s interactive voice response systems this is more often by choice and design of those operating them over anything else.
It seems like IVR has been commonly used as a tool to lose callers in the system so they don’t cancel subscriptions, ask for refunds, complain or get real help. It is an easy scapegoat for companies to blame when they really don’t want to help, but can’t say so.
This is not the way you should be using IVR.
A far better purpose for utilizing IVR is to streamline both your internal operations and the customer experience for those interacting with your organization.
Use IVR to route inbound callers directly to the optimal person to serve them. The person best suited and able to answer their questions and help them. Use it to skip all of the frustrating transferred calls, dropped calls, hold times, repeating their issue and identifying information, and turning an otherwise ripe and happy customer into someone having a really bad day.
Use it to send them right to make automated payments, the ideal sales person, service department, or tech support. Advanced IVR systems with machine learning capabilities can even help route based on customer patterns from previous calls, their attitude and language signals, and other factors.
Just some of the obvious benefits from directing callers this way include:
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Here are more of the advantages and valuable perks of IVR.
IVR means you can get a whole lot more accomplished with far fewer phone agents. Salespeople are dealing only with hot interested leads who are already taking action.
Tighter, more productive teams mean overall lower operating costs thanks to savings on recruiting, benefits plans, perks, easier daily management, and lower corporate liability risks.
With instant re-routing capabilities you can adjust your system and flow of calls at any time. This allows you to immediately adapt to reprogram for natural disasters, viral outbreaks and quarantines and civil unrest, to keep your business running when it would otherwise come to a stand still. This makes all the difference in surviving and thriving against your competitors.
This is in addition to being able to program phone routing by time of day, day of week, and day of year. Plus, rerouting if remote workers are out sick or one department is overloaded on calls.
One of the big traps that crush organizations is not being setup to scale. This means being able to scale efficiently and profitably in busy and lucrative times, just as much as it means being able to seamlessly contract without bad press in leaner times of economic turmoil. IVR and smart routing options let you do this.
Whether integrating AI or not, IVR can help organically automate conversions of sales prospects, and bring back repeat business and referrals. Callers can go through all the steps to buy without needing to speak to a live human rep. That means lower costs, better margins, and a hyper efficient operation.
