7 Effective Tips to Make the Most out of IVR Calling System from office's blog

Even though the IVR calling system is very big and has been around for a long time, not much thought is put into its structure and flow, and it is still not used to its full potential. In fact, a recent study found that telephony and IVR were the most frustrating ways for 32% of people to talk to customer service.

Here are seven tips from our experts on how to improve yourIVR softwaremetrics and make your phone service better.

1. Make as many changes as you can to the IVR.

2. It shouldn't be a business goal to hide agents.

3. Use IVR conversations.

4. Give people a picture

5. Don't make your client wait.

6. Look at the IVR data, which can give you insights.

7. Use IVR to measure your return on investment by looking at the rate of task completion (TCR)

You know your customers pretty well, so why do you talk to them every time like it's the first time? A little personalization from contact centres across all customer service channels will go a long way, whether it's just greeting a customer by name or thanking them for their continued business. Confirm information from customers, like their name, phone number, dates, etc., instead of asking them for it.

Personalization can go even further. C-Zentrix IVRs can tell if a caller is calling for the first time or if they have called before. If the call is from a customer who has called before, the Interactive Voice Response can be set up to tell the person what they did or said the last time they called. Example: When a call comes in, the CZ IVR recognizes the caller by their phone number, and the CZ Helpdesk integration tells it that the caller recently placed an order and gives details about how it will be delivered. Now, CZ IVR can greet the caller by name and tell them the status of their order as soon as the call connects. If the call was for a different reason, the caller may be able to tell CZ IVR what that reason was. Many industries, like airlines, e-commerce, etc., have started to use this feature.

Don't make it hard or impossible for people to reach a contact centre agent when they call. You shouldn't use an Interactive Voice Response to get rid of agent calls or make them very specialised. The goal of modern IVR is to make it easier for people to use self-service, which is becoming more and more popular. Make sure your customers have the instructions and tools they need to do their own work. The next tip will help you get better at self-service by using IVR software.

Our experts say that traditional touch-tone IVRs should be paired with speech IVR, especially an IVR that can understand more than just the words being said.

In the past, DTMF IVRs had trouble categorising and passing on information. However, the latest speech-based IVRs allow callers to speak their needs, and the Interactive Voice Response not only understands their words but also their meaning to decide how the caller moves through the system.

A recent survey by Gartner showed that more than 65% of customers between the ages of 18 and 44 use their mobile phones to look for service more than once a month. In another survey, 57.8% of the people asked said that they would rather see than hear the IVR options. With these facts, it's easy to see where the next CX investments should go.

With a visual IVR calling system, the usual IVR prompts and options are turned into an easy-to-use web page. The link to this page can be sent to the caller via SMS. It works like magic for businesses because it makes long Interactive Voice Response flows and multi-level menus easier to use and gives callers the option to go back in the menu if they forget something. With the visual IVR from C-Zentrix, customers can also send a ticket to the contact centre about their problem.

Customers' time is valuable, so you can't expect them to stay on the line for a long time or go through the whole IVR flow. By letting your customers ask for a call back, you can speed up the service process for them. CZ IVR's call back feature works by giving callers a menu option they can choose to ask for a call back. The request is added to the agent's list of phone numbers to call and is called out in order of priority. 63% of people would first look for answers on a business's digital channels before calling its customer service hotline.

If your IVR isn't working well, it could be driving up your operations costs and making callers angry with confusing prompts, hard-to-find options, or long wait times. If these problems aren't fixed quickly, they make it harder to provide good customer service. The best way to have a better future is to keep track of trends in your historical reporting and understand how the contact centres can use the information to change processes before a trend can hurt your business. For instance, the amount of traffic at each node and where it drops off is a great way to tell if your IVR needs to be changed.

Putting money into an IVR tool is a big investment, so it's important to measure the return on investment (ROI). Our experts say that TCR, or Task Completion Rate, is one of the best ways to measure how well Interactive Voice Response works.

It's important to know that a caller may not always be able to reach their goal on the same channel. Each channel helps reach the goal in a different way. The next step is to turn these goals into tasks and subtasks.

A task is an interaction with a customer, from figuring out what the customer wants to a final result. The end result could be a hang-up (because the task is finished in a fully automated environment) or a transfer to an agent for more help. Tasks are often specific to a certain industry and work towards a similar goal. For example, if the goal is to book a flight, related travel industry tasks could include checking the balance of miles, making a new reservation, or changing an existing one.

Sub-tasks break up tasks into dialogs that are used over and over again, such as "login," "authentication," "main menu," "yes/no confirmation," etc.

A business should track the completion of these tasks and subtasks to find out how well the IVR works and how much money it makes.

When trying to measure and improve IVR performance, it can be hard to know where to put your development efforts. Investing in each part of the Interactive Voice Response will make it better, but businesses don't know which part will make the biggest difference: voice user interface (VUI) design, speech grammars, audio quality, speech recognition technology, network quality, personalization, or integration with other channels.

So, improving IVR calling system flow to get the best performance out of it should be an ongoing task with constant changes.