4 Ways Companies Benefit from Using IVR Services

In a recent article, Shelby Faris takes in in-depth look at Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology. She acknowledges that though IVR is a vital component of many companies’ customer service, it’s not without its faults. IVR makes call routing to appropriate departments easier, but this can be at the detriment to the customer experience if the IVR is poor quality or not set up properly. Some examples Faris gives include:

• Challenging or tedious navigation menus
• Poor audio quality/volume
• Options that are too general or broad for the customers’ specifics needs

With these challenges in mind, Faris suggests that the future of IVR lies within a hybrid of AI bot technology and live, human agents. Bots can assist the IVR system by removing the need for menus and personalizing the IVR messages for each customer. Both of these tools will serve as virtual agents for human call center agents to help make them more efficient and improve their service capabilities.

4 Ways Companies Benefit from Using IVR Services

The article by Shelby Faris touches on great points regarding the positive and negative aspects of Interactive Voice Response technology. It’s true, many companies seek to use the services to streamline their customer experience, but it can often backfire with poor quality or set-up. That being said, we at Outsource Consultants have helped companies find the right IVR services for their needs that ended up providing them with numerous benefits. The following are four reasons companies use IVR services:

1. Unlimited scalability and increased availability. IVR technology can help companies ramp-up during busy times of the year (Thanksgiving through New Year’s Eve, for example) and also open up customer service availability to 24 hours per day. This can be extremely advantageous to smaller companies that can’t afford to hire additional staff.
2. Reduced number of calls that need to be routed to a live agent due to customers having the option for self-service. This alleviates stress on the agents by reducing the calls flooding their queues.
3. Reduced operations costs due to having no maintenance fees, no capital expenditures, and no need for internal technical experts. IVR also reduces the need to add more live agents in some occasions, which provides a big cost-saving benefit as well.
4. Personalized interactions between customers and live agents. This is possible as a result of the IVR software: gathering data before the call connects, sorting and directing callers based on their specific issues, and logging data on calling patterns and calling issues during each interaction.

This blog post is based on an article from CustomerThink. To read the original article, please click the link below:

The IVR of the Future Uses Artificial Intelligence – Shelby Faris