Smart IVR Can Save You Thousands And Providing Better Customer Service

A Smart IVR (Interactive Voice Response) Web-based interface with an ACD (Automatic Call Distributor) system can maximize and accelerate enterprise-wide call-routing capability. By directing calls to the appropriate agent according to pre-selected categories, Smart IVR initiates an automatic response in the appropriate medium – which could be voice, callback, e-mail or fax, among others – so that communications happen very quickly.  For developers, this creates seemingly limitless opportunities to turn out voice/Internet telephony apps that can simplify business processes and easily scale across large enterprises.

With Smart IVR businesses need fewer humans to perform call-related functions and just one IVR system to handle all of their physical operations, however far-flung. It’s the most cost-effective way to conduct intra- and inter-office business communications.  Now small and mid-size businesses can deploy customer service practices that were once only accessible to the Fortune 500.

Smart IVR connects calls to the appropriate internal databases so that callers get their routine requests handled without having to talk with anybody. The import of this, in human-relations terms, can’t be overstated. Not only will Smart IVR let companies sharply reduce or even eliminate the customer service staff assigned to repetitive tasks, it also will let them redeploy some of those reps to handle questions and problems that require people-facing interactions. As more workers become involved with customers on a much more meaningful, interpersonal level, Smart IVR becomes a potent customer-retention tool.

A good example of how Smart IVR effectively streamlines tasks is the way big pharmacies might apply it. With simple instruction sets that can be spoken or dialed in pharmacists are free to work on tasks that call for a more human touch—like answering questions from anxious patients about things like drug effectiveness, side effects and dosage instructions.

The larger point here is that Smart IVR functionality meets the escalating customer demand for an ever-expanding palette of self-service options that are available 24/7. This technology gives consumers what they want today: fast, unbroken access to accurate, easily-updated information.

Smart IVR makes it easy and intuitive to deliver and receive instructions (via the web) for apps like automatic call distribution, auto-attendant and voice recording. Cloud services no allow, businesses to avoid the capital expenditure of hosting the infrastructure; they just pay for what they use.
Since Smart IVR can be another in-cloud component, developers can modify applications in a Smart IVR system as quickly as they can write new ones, giving them tremendous creative versatility to adapt telephony options to emerging corporate communications needs. For example, they can design for high-volume telephony operations by implementing enterprise-wide process controls on how phone calls are received, routed and conference.

There’s a lesson in this for the telcos, too.  Networks must continue to support communications behaviors that have become habitual, and indispensable, in the corporate world. The bandwidth is pretty much there to serve the great number and variety of enterprise customers that will demand new custom voice enhancements for their business processes. Carriers can sell the infrastructure capability that their customers will want, and need, to do this kind of communication management on their own.

While waiting on recorded-voice instructions can be depersonalizing under the best of circumstances, the speedier relay of information in lighter code can have a more natural, human feel - as if it’s a live person responding. There’s less time spent waiting on the phone for a less-robotic-sounding answer. It can make the difference between retaining and losing a customer. It’s the way next-generation Smart IVR will evolve.

Smart IVR can routinely give people touch-tone keypad selection choices to leave a voicemail, and e-mail, or invite return calls to their cell phone. The technology is customizing how business people prioritize their telephony access to their callers.
Smart IVR is challenging app developers and their CIO/CTO customers to envision revolutionary ways - time-and-money-saving ways - to do more business over the phone. For instance, developers can take the complexity out of call menu structures and call navigation and work with speech-recognition technologies in imaginative ways that achieve seemingly contradictory goals - more automation and greater customer satisfaction. That will be critical in accommodating mobile-phone customers who routinely conduct business in motion and - because they tend to be younger - generally are more willing to use IVR call prompts.

There’s also a direct correlation between the resulting improved service and the economic benefit to a business: by one estimate, speech-enabled solutions replace the work of people answering the phone at just one-twelfth the cost