A Complete Guide to Interactive Voice Response for Businesses

Improved call center metrics

You measure many different things to monitor the effectiveness of your call center, and lots of these numbers can be improved with the help of the right IVR setup.

For example, call abandonment can be reduced, if customers are reassured about the importance of their call, or that you’re dealing with a crisis, and really appreciate their holding for a little longer than usual. First call resolution goes up when that first call is connected to the agent with the right expertise and product knowledge, because the IVR enabled them to route through to the best person to help them.

All the measures associated with call admin — agent utilization score, after call admin, and so on, are minimized by using an IVR to collect information in advance of the voice conversation, and prepopulate the call record. Customer Y called, for the third time, because of problems with product Z… Your IVR can create this update before your agent gets off the call, and reduce their non-calling work time significantly — making the most of their expertise where it is needed, talking directly to customers.

As a result, customer satisfaction metrics like NPS are elevated, and this reflects directly in the most important metric for any business: the bottom line.

Reduced call center operation costs

By enabling a proportion of callers to complete their inquiry on a self.service basis, your IVR actually replaces some of your human agents, by taking some of the volume out.

So yes, the robots are coming for the customer service jobs — but actually, they’re coming for the more boring and routine aspects of that work, enabling the humans to remain deeply engaged with the edge cases: those customers with additional communications needs, unusual situations, or who have managed to break the product in a genuinely new way. This elevates customer support to more of an art form, creating specialized and interesting work for people who really want to make things better for others.

And it means your callers can get through to that human far more quickly, because those humans are not wasting their time crunching through policy renewals or reading people’s bank balance out to them, or any other activity which an IVR can appropriately automate.

Create a professional impression of your business

Particularly for startups or SMEs, you might not have a big call center on stand by to deal with incoming calls, or even any admin staff. But you don’t necessarily want callers to know that — you’re intending to grow, and you’ve created branding and a website which hints at bigger presence in advance. Online it’s easy to be who we want to be, but when answering the phone this can quickly unravel, if it’s obvious that there’s really only a sole trader behind this apparent enterprise.

So, you can set up a basic IVR call center to enhance your presence, and also filter out what calls you want to respond to - because if you are a solopreneur, the last thing you want is to be interrupted by every incoming call personally anyway. Let the unsolicited sales calls, bill chasers, and so on, go to voicemail, while ensuring that new business inquiries or your VIP clients are allowed to interrupt whatever you’re doing — while at the same time creating an impression of a team of specialist staff on hand.

Design your decision-tree with care

We’ve probably all had that experience when using a complicated multi-level IVR, of realizing we’ve ended up in the wrong place. Hmm, perhaps I really should have gone for option 4 instead of 3, back several layers ago… Because none of the presently offered choices are right for me.

There are many reasons this can happen, and we review more below, but often the issue can be traced back to the original design of the options at each level. And if things go wrong here, you will end up with frustrated customers who do not get their needs served.

Think about the user journey involved for each caller, and map out as many of these as possible. Each user journey should have a single and unambiguous pathway through your IVR via the shortest route possible — so once you have the basic flow mapped out, test it with different scenarios.

Even a simple ecommerce operation with a limited product range may have a large number of user journeys to consider, including:

• The person who wants to buy something online
• The person who wants to track a late delivery
• The person who has a problem and needs customer support to use their product
• The customer who hates the product and wants to complain and arrange a refund
• The wholesale enquirer who needs to talk to someone about volume transactions
• The personal call from the partner of the sales agent who has just been rushed to hospital
• The supplier who needs to discuss payment of an invoice
• The alarm company at the warehouse

And so on. There will be many more, and some will clump together in meaningful categories for your top-level list of options. But brainstorming them out, and testing their hypothetical journeys through your IVR in order of importance, will help ensure everyone’s needs are well met.

Keep the messages as short and clear as possible

Once you know the map you want to create, think about the labels and messages associated with each one.

At every level, the options on offer should be clear and distinct from one another. You don’t want people wondering, well am I a current customer, or a new enquirer, because I bought something before but I am calling about something new that I want now… help, I don’t know whether to dial 3 or 4! Perhaps some of the choices are similar to each other, or the caller themselves isn’t sure how to describe it. Or you may have designed the system using industry terminology rather than the words and descriptions your customer might use.

A common culprit here are tax offices, where a multitude of different circumstances might apply, and a typical user is not an expert in any way - they’re calling because of something confusing them, but might not know which department they need to help sort it out. It would be far better to create an IVR system which asks them to input their tax reference number at the first level, then intelligently suggests options which might be most relevant and helpful to them.

You should also limit the number of options to choose from, ensuring it is as short as possible, because people usually have to listen to all the possibilities before deciding which one best applies to their situation. Human working memory is finite, and again you create stress for your customers if they struggle to decide because it’s overcomplicated. If you find you’re creating more than 5 options to choose between, it might make sense to introduce another layer into your system for some users.

Use clear professional recordings

Not that long ago, when IVR numbers were not generally user-configurable, businesses would define their messaging and pay for the phone company to provide it complete with all recordings, provided by professional voice artistes.

While this is less typical nowadays, and indeed it may be important for you to be able to rapidly update your messages yourself, it’s worth remembering the importance of clear, neutral, and articulate voices for your recordings. Strong accents, mispronunciations, and even a lack of consistency - using different people for different bits of the IVR - can create confusion for your users, as well as diminishing the professional impression you want to offer, so do give this some thought.

In future, synthetic voices might well take the place of human voice recordings in IVRs, but for now the warmth and humanity of a real person is well worth investing in.

Provide an escape hatch

However carefully you have designed and set it up, people need to be able to escape from your IVR!

There could be many reasons for this, and you cannot pre-empt them all with the right set of options. Perhaps they are disabled and can’t use the keypad easily, perhaps they’re not confident with inputting data, perhaps they’re upset or confused… Or have a truly unique problem. Maybe they just got so far down the wrong blind alley of the decision tree, and can’t see any way out.

So you should always do your callers the courtesy of offering an option to jump straight out of the IVR and talk to a human - assuming it’s not the middle of the night, in which case you can get a human to call them back.