First impressions matter, particularly when it comes to businesses interacting with their customers. In today’s competitive landscape, it only takes one bad interaction with a customer to convince them to seek out a competing vendor. That’s why companies around the world are investing more heavily in intelligent strategies to enhance customer experiences.
The IVR (Intelligent Voice Response) system in a contact center represents one of the most important resources companies have to make a lasting, powerful first impression on customers. It influences everything from customer effort scores to satisfaction rates and even employee productivity.
Creating the right IVR flow ensures businesses can serve customers faster, minimize call queues, and differentiate themselves from their competitors. So, how do companies design an IVR flow that works? It all starts with the following steps:
Step 1: Choose the Right Technology Platform
The first step in developing a strong IVR system is selecting the right technology to build, and manage customer communications. The right platform should be easy-to-use and flexible, allowing organizations to connect communication strategies across a range of different channels, to ensure a fully consistent omnichannel customer experience.
Powerful, omnichannel contact center solutions frequently include access to IVR building systems, which empower business leaders to optimize every step of the customer journey. Some solutions even minimize the complexity of creating IVR flows, with drag-and-drop tools as well as native integrations to essential tools for sentiment analysis, analytics, and more.
When searching for the best IVR solution, businesses should prioritize:
- Ease of use: The best IVR platforms are simple, they require minimal coding knowledge, and allow companies to experiment with different flows based on the needs of their audience.
- Omnichannel: A good IVR system should align with various aspects of a company’s customer experience strategy, ensuring consistent experiences for customers.
- Innovative: Advanced IVR solutions allow companies to implement custom apps, experiment with AI, and even take advantage of various ASR and TSS technologies.
Step 2: Plan a Comprehensive Template
Once companies have the right software to start building their IVR solutions, they can start implementing tried-and-tested templates to address every aspect of the customer journey. While the exact strategy each business uses may differ, most flows include:
- Segmentation: A good IVR solution should allow companies to segment callers at the earliest point of contact, determining their intent, requirements, and even which channel they want to communicate on in the future.
- Authentication: AI-powered authentication tools can help businesses to rapidly identify customers, and keep their accounts secure. Not only does this boost compliance, but it can help agents to surface valuable information about clients, for personalization purposes.
- Routing: After authenticating and segmenting customers, an IVR system should be able to route customers to the right agent, based on various factors, from intent and sentiment to employee skill sets and availability.
- Feedback: Customers today want to be informed about what’s actually happening in the call queue. Setting up automated systems to inform callers of the length of a queue, or how long they might have to wait for a response can reduce call abandonment rates.
- Offer callbacks: Offering a callback gives the customer an opportunity to take control of their service experience, rather than waiting around for someone to be available.
Step 3: Use Analytics and Feedback to Enhance Results
The best IVR system is a dynamic, living and breathing solution within any company’s CX strategy, it needs to evolve and transform over time, as customer preferences and expectations change. A flexible IVR system connected with an omnichannel contact center platform should make it easy for companies to not only scale their IVR experience over the years, but also optimize it.
For instance, companies can embed surveys into the IVR workflow, to collect insights about the customer journey. They can also utilize built-in analytical tools, capable of capturing everything from sentiment insights to important metrics about average handling time to customer satisfaction scores, to determine the efficacy of the IVR Flow.