The IVR (Interactive Voice Response) is an excellent tool you can enable in your call center. It can improve your customer's experience and reduce the pressure on your team. When your IVR is correctly configured in your call center software, it will allow each customer to talk directly with agents who can provide the best service for his needs, reducing his waiting time and optimizing the time of your agents, helping you to prioritize calls.
Basic tips for an effective IVR
Beyond a proper configuration, it is important to bear in mind some basic tips to make the IVR a powerful tool for your call center that really improves customer experience and helps to boost your sales and support processes in your call center.
Your IVR must have few options: There is nothing more annoying for a customer than a menu with a huge list of options; It is recommended that a menu have no more than 3 or 4 options, to reduce waiting time and offer a good customer experience.
Learn to set up your IVR with Toky in few minutes.
Use short and understandable messages: The welcome greeting message must inform the customer he called your business and mention the menu options. If you can't get a professional recording, you should ensure that the person who records the messages speaks clearly, without background noise and using a script with a short message.
You can also use TTS (Text to Speech) services to convert custom scripts into greeting audios that you can upload to your IVR. Learn how in this article
Put the most common options in first positions: To follow this advice, you must know your customers enough to be able to put in the first positions, the most common positions. If you know most of your customers call for support, this option should be for example in option 1, if after support, then the most common are sales queries, put this option of 2 and so on.
Define how to serve calls outside of working hours: If a customer calls you outside of your working hours, your IVR must kindly inform him that he will not be attended for any agent, inform your business working hours and give them the option to leave a voicemail with his name and query.
Learn how to set up the working hours of your business in Toky
Never leave your customer waiting in silence: Another annoying and frustrating situation for customers is feeling like the call was dropped before being answered. When your IVR is in silence, either due to a wrong configuration or because you did not add hold music or other options, that silence can be understood by the customer as a call drop and generate a bad experience.
First mention the option and then its description: To improve the recall of the options, it is recommended to mention the option first and then the description, for example: Press 1, for support; press 2, for sales. It generates a lot of frustration to your customers having to repeat the options menu to be able to find the one that they can use.
You must offer a direct option to leave a voicemail or contact an agent: Many times your customers are confused with the options, so you must offer neutral alternatives that can easily be used to leave their questions; one can be direct access to voicemail and another an option to speak with an agent.
You can improve your process of receiving calls with your IVR if you learn to configure the advanced IVR options
How to configure the Toky IVR
In Toky, you can create and configure your IVR for each virtual phone number connected to your call center. Learn in the following video how you can easily configure the IVR to optimize the support and sales processes.
With Toky, besides IVR and phone numbers you will have excellent features for your call center. Learn more about Toky, try it for free.