What is IVR (Interactive Voice Response)?

With the way businesses have grown now a days and the kind of competition that exists, after sales service or customer support has become one of the most important part of a business. One of the most important aspect of customer support is the response time and accuracy. Imagine you call a bank to discuss about credit card but you end up landing in the loan department. Wouldn’t it be frustrating?

This had been a usual problem in the early days when customer support had started over the phone through call centers. As a result a lot of calls started reaching departments that they were not intended to. This causes frustration not only to the consumer but was also was a cause for loss to business. A lot of infrastructure investments are done in order to receive these calls but ending up at wrong place does not fetch anything at the end.

Solution to this:

In order to get over this problem, IVR systems were developed and they started getting commercialized as early as 1970. With every passing day, these IVRs are now becoming sophisticated and more and more helpful.

How IVR works:

Interactive voice response are basically set of predefined responses based on user inputs. User inputs are provided in couple of ways either through speech or via keypad. Based on the user input, the software behind IVR decides next course of action. IVRs also guide the users using mostly pre-recorded audio to the next step.

Banking, Telephone sector etc. are some of the major users of these IVR services. Since these business offers variety of services and there customer base is very diverse, one solution is to have a separate line for each business. But this would be very costly setup as they will have to invest in infrastructure multiple times for the same use. Another effective way is to use IVRs to filter the calls to respective business set.

Advantages of using IVRs:

1. Enhanced customer experience because of less wait period.
2. Enhanced business for the company.
3. Reduction in call volume to the call centers which allows effective handling.
4. Business can also use intelligent IVR systems to answer customer’s simple queries after office hours without having someone actually sitting and doing it.
5. It gives a lot of flexibility to the business. If there are lots of calls waiting, IVRs could actually let the caller know and let him decide to wait or place a request for callback.

But as it is said, everything comes with a cost and equal risk. IVRs on one hand could be very helpful to enhance a business but at the same time a poorly maintained IVR system could actually lead to more frustration for the customer’s and eventually loss of business. It is very important that business pay a lot of attention in setting up their IVR. It has to be very clear and need to ensure that customer reaches the intended department in as less interaction as possible.

IVRs are certainly a big asset for business now a days as more and more business are done over the phone and a lot of interactions happen there and an easy/quick system can add to overall experience.

If you are interested to getting full details about IVR Services then visit at http://interpremium.net.

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