Typical IVR Solutions

Tom Baker at Vonage outlines the typical uses of IVR solutions.

Typical IVR Solutions

Tom Baker (Vonage)

The first and most common use of an IVR is to direct callers to the right people within your business. So you’ll have a main telephone number that you offer to callers.

You will present them with a number of different options so that they can select what their inquiry is about. And depending on what they select, you can then direct them to the right people within your business.

For example, sales, service, warranty, retentions, finance, however your business is structured. Now there’s a whole bunch of other things that you can do with an IVR outside of that typical functionality.

You can use an IVR for deflection to easier-to-serve methods.

So if you don’t want certain types of inquiry to be handled by people, you can direct them to audible messages that will tell the caller what they need to do instead. You could send them text messages, you could direct them to relevant pieces of your website, or you could divert them to non-voice channels like text, chat, that kind of thing, which might be easier to serve.

You can also build self-service systems in general, which could include payment systems, within your IVR. This will allow the caller to take action without needing to speak to someone, which reduces your overall need for agents to answer typical inquiries.

Then, depending on how complex you want to get, you can integrate the IVR with your back-end systems, and you could introduce some kind of AI solution.

And so instead of going from a press one, press two, press three, option-type system, you can instead have a much more conversational interaction with the IVR, where an AI solution says, ‘Hi, I am a voice bot, I can help you with X, Y, Z. Tell me what you need’.

And then you can converse with it, it will understand you, and then it will present options for how it can resolve the issues. And if it’s unable to, it can then hand off to a human being for more complex solutions.

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