If you run a call center, you already understand the importance of giving your callers a great customer experience. After all, you don’t need an online business degree in order to know that it’s crucial to provide your customers and clients with top-notch service. That being said, not all call center software is created equally, and, in fact, some systems and features are far more important to enable at your contact center than others.
One such feature is something called conversational IVR, or interactive voice response. With interactive voice response, your call center can use artificial intelligence and bot technology in order to automate aspects of your business much more easily. Here’s everything you need to know about conversational IVR.
What is Conversational IVR?
As mentioned earlier, conversational IVR uses artificial intelligence to guide customers through menu items over the phone. In traditional interactive voice response, a customer will be given a prompt and then press a number in order to be routed through a menu and to the appropriate support agent or department.
Nowadays, when smartphones are the main way customers call your business, having to pull up a dial pad can be cumbersome. With conversational IVR, natural language processing lets the caller speak their need out loud. Then, voice recognition technology and artificial intelligence help process their request and route them to the appropriate person quickly and efficiently. As a result, customers no longer need to memorize multiple options, since they can get to where they need to be using their own words.
The culmination of all of these benefits is a self-service system that customers can actually get behind, as it truly serves their needs.
How Can Conversational IVR Improve Your Business?
The way that conversational IVR can improve customer service is a major boon for businesses of all sizes. After all, happier customers lead to repeat business, and it’s much more valuable to keep an existing customer than it is to attract a new one. Since conversational IVR is constantly learning from the sorts of requests your customers make using speech recognition technology, its IVR is constantly improving.
This means that each customer winds up routed to the proper agent instead of the first available. This also means that you have the opportunity to better harness customer data and understand their needs based on natural language tools.
As a result, when your business does connect with a customer, it’s easier than ever to resolve their issue, since you know that the agent speaking to the customer has the skills and knowledge to handle their request. This can improve agent productivity and satisfaction, since each time a member of your support team gets to interact with a customer, they are leaving the call knowing that they’ve made a difference in that customer’s day.
Because traditional IVR only connects a caller to the first live agent based on numerical prompts, there are plenty of times that the first person a customer speaks with isn’t able to resolve issues they’re facing. If you really want to increase your productivity and the way you handle your call volume, conversational IVR is definitely the way to go.
As you can see, there are a variety of benefits to reap from using conversational IVR. Whether you’re focused on making your customers’ lives easier or are interested in boosting the productivity of your live agents, starting to utilize conversational IVR instead of a traditional IVR can be a win-win for you and your company. The IVR system you utilize in your contact center plays an important role in the quality of your customer service, so make sure to think twice before settling for a lesser option.
