What is Contact Centre Interactive Voice Response (IVR)?

Posted: 7 March 2023

An Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is a routing tool within a contact centre solution that enables incoming callers to be directed to the correct department or the most appropriate agent based on selecting an option using the keypad.

In this blog, we will uncover how a contact centre IVR operates, a few key benefits of IVR technology, and the objectives that can be met.

How does a contact centre IVR operate?

Using the touch-tone keypad on their phone, the customer can select one of the announced options, enabling the IVR to route them to the correct department or resolve their inquiry through self-service.

The challenge for organisations is that IVRs can be difficult to maintain, causing inconvenience for IT departments who manage updates and changes to the IVR that could take up to a week or longer. This process causes delays in editing IVR workflows, which has the potential to impact the customer experience.

IVR call centre software makes this process easy, empowering business users to maintain their workflows in minutes without IT.

What are the benefits of using contact centre IVR software?

  • Increase First Call Resolution: The IVR system will route the customer to the most appropriate department best equipped to handle specific customer inquiries.
  • Achieve Self-Service: Integrating your IVR with your CRM can facilitate automation and customer self-service, e.g., the customer can find out the estimated delivery date of their parcel as the IVR pulls this data from the CRM.
  • Ease of Use: Workflows in the IVR can be updated within just a few minutes
  • Understand Customer Satisfaction: A post-call survey call be integrated into the IVR as the final step in the customer’s journey. Organisations can then capture and measure customer satisfaction, providing actionable insights.
  • Reduce Average Handle Time: As the IVR will route the customer to the most skilled agent, the time it takes to resolve customer queries will be reduced to optimise metrics such as Average Handle Time (AHT)
  • Increase Agent Productivity: Offering customer self-service options through the IVR can enable simple customer inquiries to be resolved so that agents can focus on more complex customer queries.

 

If you want to discover how ipSCAPE can help optimise your contact centre with our advanced Interactive Voice Response technology, contact us today. 

ipSCAPE is a cloud communication technology that is feature-rich, scalable, and has advanced integration capabilities. We help businesses connect with their customers through multi-channel communications, including Voice, Web Chat, Email, SMS, IVR and other emerging channels.