What to Look for When Buying an IVR – Best IVR Service Provider in India

There are many IVR System for Small Business India, and they have various features; some are very useful, and some are less useful; well, it depends on business to business. Some businesses need a plethora of features, and some need only basic features. Individuals or businesses just have to look for the features before implementing an IVR system in their business. Below we have added some of the most useful features businesses use frequently. 

Queue Updates

If your IVR’s goal is to connect callers to the best available adviser as fast as possible, but you see a lot of transfers, it might suggest that your advisors are taking on the IVR system’s role, which is never a good thing. Instead, search for IVR services and their capabilities that inform callers of their position in the line as well as an approximate wait time. This will assist them in determining whether a callback is the best option for them. Just keep in mind some other fundamentals in mind when it comes to IVR messaging. These include eliminating duplicate messages, adjusting the voice for different phone queues, and obtaining the proper music-to-message ratio.

Self-Service

By automating regular encounters, more businesses are assisting their consumers in getting on their way faster. This allows advisers to focus on more involved, sophisticated, or high-value engagements. As a best practice, make sure that your clients may easily exit your automated system at any time. Integrate your CRM data to automatically give advisors with all data acquired in self-service if elevation to live support is required for complete context and tailored attention. Allowing clients to request live support (at any time throughout their engagement) allows you to provide numerous resolution alternatives for a better customer experience.

Conversational Capabilities

Conversational AI is growing prominent, thanks to the success and popularity of Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistance, and Amazon’s Alexa – even inside the contact center business. There’s no need for long, complex phone menus or speech bots that seem odd to communicate with today’s conversational IVR capabilities. Look for AI features like automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), and natural language understanding (NLU) in your IVR to make it simple for your clients or consumers to obtain the service they need, when they need it, by just expressing what they need.

Identification and Verification Abilities

Recent Advancements in IVR technology enable users to identify and validate clients or consumers before connecting them with an agent. These advances contribute to lower total cost-per-call and improved overall levels of agility, performance, and productivity. Aside from the client’s value for money, the speed of the automated operations reduces call times, wait times, and improves the customer experience.

Prompting Features

The prompting feature in the IVR system allows organizations to target their specific customer with a set of recorded messages.  The system retrieves and plays a specific prompt based on client data (phone numbers, postcodes, booking references). This enables you to create relevant and personal IVR experiences by employing a consistent voice across all circumstances. For example, If you are a hotel owner and a guest who a booking after three days calls your customer support, the guest is prompted to enter a customer ID or account ID. As guests enter their details, the system could recognize you and get your booking details. And the IVR would prompt the customer, “Is this regarding your room booking?”

Automatic Callbacks

Many times self-help service fails to provide the resolution for the customers’ problems. In that case, the system transfers the call to a live agent or triggers an automatics callbacks system in which the agent callback the customer as soon as they become available. Adding this feature into the IVR system saves your customers time by not letting them wait in the queue while being on hold. This helps businesses to value their client or customers’ time, Callback innovation within IVR software has assisted several firms in improving customer happiness while also lowering abandonment rates and average wait times.

CRM Integration

CRM systems provide:

• Agents access to all prior communication with a customer.
• Allowing them to pick up where they left off and deliver a more efficient.
• Relevant service.

By integrating the CRM and the IVR, call centers may adjust common greets depending on previous encounters.

But it isn’t all. If the CRM has information about a purchase made the day before a call, the IVR greeting may be customized to say something like, “Are you calling about your new product?” and the menu of responses and options can be tailored accordingly.

Reporting Tools

A successful IVR will contain reporting capabilities that provide insights into customers’ behavioral tendencies at each stage of the journey and provide possibilities for improvement based on the data. A useful example would be to examine dropout rates at various phases of the trip since this may reveal places of friction, such as imprecise language or jargon, that may be addressed. Whether your goal is call deflection, AHT reduction, or CSAT improvement, analytics provides the data for improving the IVR experience. Many IVR platforms have reporting capabilities for each of your IVR apps. However, it is frequently the granular level of data that might reveal problems you were unaware of.

Personalized IVR Messaging

An easy technique to handle unanticipated demand is to put an issue message at the appropriate point in the IVR trip. This will describe the reason, the effect, and the expected resolution time, followed by a conduit for additional information, such as a URL or customer portal. An even more user-friendly method would be to determine when a client will likely be impacted and just broadcast the message to them. This is possible if we detect their phone number using caller line identification (CLI) and correlate it with a specific customer record. For example, if you are in the broadband business and there is a storm in Delhi, you may identify each client in the Delhi area and build an IVR message specifically for them, informing them of the problem. This may eliminate the necessity for the phone call. To take it a step further, some businesses demand users opt-in for SMS updates and push alerts via the SMS channel if necessary.

Call-Flow Customization

Call center customization has always been a pain, whether it’s modifying the agent interface, creating custom dashboards, or connecting systems for enhanced context or process automation. We want solutions that are simple to customize, particularly the IVR. We can create menus using this form of IVR to deflect typical concerns about cancellation policies or service continuity and manage regular requests like booking cancellations.

To do this rapidly, it is beneficial to use the capabilities of a flow builder with:

• A graphical user interface enables DIY design using simple methods such as drag-and-drop.
• Simple configuration allows you to interface with any of your systems.
• Complete control over flow actions and events.

These capabilities will allow you to quickly change your IVR to match changing customer demands while providing an intelligent, efficient, and frictionless customer experience.

Call Deflection

Apart from its usual function, an IVR may direct calls to automated channels such as SMS. The IVR sends a text message to clients or consumers, inviting them to continue the conversation through SMS. This is especially useful when there is a high call volume and a high cost of service. Intelligent call deflection powered by IVR may minimize inbound call queues and decrease long wait times for customers related to that, hence enhancing their experience. This form of deflection requires little caller interaction. Calls received after hours may be routed to automated channels. The IVR may also be coupled with natural language call steering (NLCS) technologies to route calls based on intent to live agents or automated services.

IVR Command Optimization

This IVR feature is an automated service that tracks how each dialed option is used by all callers and prioritizes the most popular ones for new incoming callers. This advantage is that only the most frequently picked alternatives are provided first, resulting in a substantially shorter average wait time and happier clients. It can also keep up with evolving consumer wants, which means that the prioritized selections will vary in real-time based on client patterns.

Visual Capabilities

Many IVR systems are now visual, and use technology to direct callers to the most relevant agent or channel, perhaps allowing customers to obtain answers faster than conventional IVR. This form of self-service help enables the caller to consider the appropriate next steps. This is excellent since they will most likely want and require clear instruction and understanding when their anxiety levels are high. When call traffic is high, visual IVR will also assist divert calls, leaving agents accessible for when a situation escalates. Customers are more likely to offer information and choose the proper menu choice as visual IVR continues to simplify the customer experience.

Journey Analytics

Call centers may acquire a better understanding of how clients and consumers handle the IVR system by implementing analytics on top of any IVR and routing solutions. Contact centers may better comprehend the context and sentiment of every future conversation with an agent by combining this with voice analytics. Contact centers will then have a complete picture of the IVR customer experience, allowing them to address pain spots and make efficient and timely enhancements. Finally, incorporating analytics into IVR systems would allow contact centers to provide great customer experiences while also maximizing IVR effectiveness.

Context Preservation

Most of the time, businesses want to keep clients in the channel where they started their discussion. It’s the greatest way to assure the client or consumer achieves their objective, and it’s also incredibly handy for the customer. However, when a consumer has visited your website or has sophisticated or multidimensional transaction needs, it may be required to ask them to phone or for you to call them personally. As a result, the IVR should ensure that a client may resume where they left off without having to repeat themselves.

Caller Intent Prediction

If the IVR is linked with other call center systems, it should know who the caller is and what they were working on before that call, or the “What, When, and Where.” It also implies that the IVR will evaluate those circumstances and offer to assist in completing the activity with a prompt like: “I notice you’ve been attempting to accomplish a money transfer; would you want to do that now?” When it comes to providing a tailored experience for clients, continuity is essential.

In order to optimize customer experience, your IVR should be able to predict and adjust not only to user intent but also to user preferences, frequency of usage, and user speed.

Wrapping up

These were some of the best features that a business should look for when going to buy an IVR system for their business. If you are looking for some of the IVR services and want the best IVR system price in India, You can refer to SAN Softwares’ EasyGoIVR, which is the best IVR service provider in India.