Your Interactive Voice Response system (IVR) is your first and most critical opportunity to impress and support your customers from the moment they establish contact. As such, building your ideal IVR should be a key focus for optimizing the customer experience (CX) and supporting the functions that drive business success. The transformative effects of a seamless, efficient, and customer-friendly IVR are direct drivers for cultivating customer loyalty and driving peak performance across operational functions.

So, what makes an IVR that boosts performance and moves your operation forward? Keep it clear. Keep it short. Keep it effortless for your customer.

Establish an IVR sequence that mirrors query traffic and customer need, presents an easily navigable menu, and follows an efficient flow to cultivate the optimal CX customer experience. Our highly efficient IVR menu flow example breaks down the critical functions of an optimized IVR model.

Immediate customer segmentation drives an efficient service journey to deliver support in rapid time. Because your customers are listening for the specific department or support they need, your IVR model should announce the department name before the option number, e.g., “For technical support, press 1.”

This same strategy applies to directing customers to self-service support options by offering routes such as, “Please visit our website and select ‘Schedule Now’ for quick and convenient appointment scheduling.”

Authentication enables you to serve your customers more quickly and efficiently, saves valuable agent time, and assures them that their information is protected. This feature communicates to your customers that you care about them as individuals, increasing brand loyalty and your Customer Lifetime Value.

After your customers are effectively segmented, it’s time to determine what specific support your customer is seeking. For example, “For technical support with Product A, press 1,” “For technical support with Product B, press 2.”

When a customer presents with a complex support need, your best bet for delivering quality and efficiency is to route the customer to a live agent for further assistance. Complex support needs include:

• Revenue activity calls
• Support for customers with a history of significant transactions
• Large-scale account holders

When a customer has a simple need you can resolve via an existing self-service option, you can deflect the call and decrease call volume by rerouting the customer to another channel, e.g., “To access the operating manual for Product A, please visit our website and select ‘Operating Manuals.”

Providing an accurate estimated wait time for support is a helpful customer tool, a critical influencer of the customer’s forthcoming experience, and a vehicle that can drive call traffic to alternative self-service options. It’s a win/win. You’re improving the customer experience and enabling peak performance to meet goals for KPIs such as call volume, service levels, average hold time, etc.

Our consulting services enabled our client to achieve a 21% increase in CSAT and reduce costs by 8%. This case study demonstrates how our efficient solutions helped them set the new industry benchmark.

The callback option is one of the greatest features of the modern IVR model. It is a sure bet that your customers would rather request a call back within the same wait timeframe than twiddle their thumbs and listen to hold time music. The callback function improves:

• Abandonment rates
• Call volume
• Queue integrity
• Agent efficiency
• And, most importantly, customer satisfaction