Optimize Your IVR and Enhance Customer Experience

It is easy to put an IVR system in place. You call in a vendor and explain your requirement. The IVR developer creates a menu for the system and that is that. Customers use the IVR, listen to a long-winded message and are offered choice of key presses. They press one key and that leads to another set of options. Customer rage and frustration mounts. His time is wasted and his problem remains unresolved. It is no wonder that IVRs can lead to customer churn. Smart enterprises optimize IVR all the time based on feedbacks and analytics. Otherwise, what is supposed to be a self service system can be potentially harmful.

Analyze IVR to optimize it

A generic IVR solution rarely works from the customer perspective. What does your customer want when he dials a number that leads to an IVR? You get the answer through constant, ongoing analytics of the customer journey.

A few things one can do to optimize IVRs:

• Keep menu options short
• Offer backtracking to main menu at each branch and sub-branch.
• Offer facility to speak directly to customer agent in the main menu itself.
• Opt for dynamic IVR instead of a fixed IVR system
• Avoid promotional messages when the call connects.
• At the end you could possibly request feedback on quality of experience.
• An IVR cannot be a portmanteau system to cover ticket booking IVR, information IVR or IVR payment solution. Of course, there are times when integration is a good idea such as in ticket booking with IVR payment integration for an on the spot completion of the process.

Those are the basics to start with. However, no IVR is perfect from the word “go”. Therefore, refining it is necessary. Keeping your specialist in IVR development by your side is just as important as constant analytics that identify bottlenecks, find common patterns that create repugnance and map the complete journey of the customer. How many leave half way? How many complete the transaction?

Plan and craft beforehand

One mindset is to just install and have up and running an IVR solution from any expert in IVR development. “We will see about it later” is the common statement when it comes to finer points of aligning IVR to customer needs. This can be self-defeating. Instead, it pays to retain experts in IVR development to assist with analytics of the business, analytics of customer behaviors and expectations and analysis of the service. Then, your IVR developer may come up with a dynamic IVR or a purposed IVR that works much better – from customer perspective.

It does cost a little extra but it is well worth it when you consider the cost of customer churn.

Source: https://ivrpaymentprocessingsolutions.wordpress.com/2019/04/15/optimize-your-ivr-and-enhance-customer-experience/