How IVR in Call Center Solution Enhance Customer Service?

Call center software solutions offer a wide range of features. Some of these features are provided only by the advanced call center software or a specific provider and some of these features are common. Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is one of the most common features. It is available in all call center solutions. All call centers use the IVR feature to greet the customer when they are connected to the call. The IVR gives various self serving options and if the customer chooses to talk to the agent, an IVR will play music on hold with a message for the customer to stay on the line.

The IVR feature of a call center solution can be very useful in multiple manners. It can, in fact, help in delivering better customer service. How? Let me share the top 4 tips that you can follow to make the best use of an IVR feature of call center software:

1. Introduce self service

An IVR system can be used to let customers get answers to their common questions. For example, knowing the balance in the savings account can be made autonomous with the IVR feature. There are many more operations that can be automated with an interactive voice response. In this case, customers do not need to wait until they get connected to an agent to get answers to their questions. They also need to get into a formal conversation. A feature of the call center solution will take care of it.

2. Use it for effective call routing

A call center solution offers a wide array of call routing features such as advanced call routing, skill based call routing, sticky agent, longest idle agent call routing, and more. Combining the IVR and call routing features can be a beneficial solution. The IVR can quickly interact with the customer to know about him and then route the call to one of the most relevant call routing queues for the customer. This helps in connecting a customer to the right agent to get first call resolution.

3. Attend customer off-hours

If your company or call center does not work 24*7, then IVR can be an amazing feature to use. The call center can set an IVR menu that lets the customer get answers to his simple or common questions by interacting with an IVR. This interactive voice response menu can also collect customer information to schedule a callback when the call center opens. It can also be used to play a simple message that informs a customer about non-working hours and holidays so the customer can call during official working hours.

4. Collect agent feedback

Some advanced call center solutions offer this type of IVR, called feedback IVR. It has ready to use prompts. The call center solution plays this feedback IVR at the end of the call to collect feedback from the customer about this experience with the agent. This can be very helpful in enhancing customer service by knowing how each customer felt after the call. The collective feedback can work as effective guidelines for the enhancement of skills of the agents and services offered to the customers.

Author works in a company that offers call center Crm integration for different systems. Some of the major integrations offered are Vicidial vTiger integration, Vicidial Zoho integration, Vicidial Salesforce integration, etc.