Something that will irritate your customers when they call you, is waiting too long. When calls increase, your customers could experience long waiting times before being served by your call center agents. This can generate missed calls and unhappy customers, many of whom will never call you back. One of the options that help reduce these waiting times is the implementation of an IVR in your phone system.
What is Interactive Voice Response or IVR?
An IVR system is implemented as a feature of a business phone system and it allows callers to interact with voice menus using the keypad of their phone. An IVR helps to connect the caller directly with the teams of agents in your call center by entering the numbers assigned to them in a phone tree menu.
Benefits of an IVR system
By having an IVR enabled in your call center, you can reduce the waiting time of your customers and also make better use of your team by directing calls right to those agents who can give better customer service, avoiding call transfers among agents which can be very annoying for your customers.
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Basic tips for an effective IVR
Keep in mind that your customers call you needing something and this creates a great sense of urgency. Having a minimum waiting time and providing good information is very important. These tips could help:
- Have a short and concrete greeting message that informs the caller where it is calling.
- Offer a voice menu with descriptive options with understandable names.
- Have few menu options by putting the most used in the top positions.
- Have a good number of agents pending to attend to the most frequent options.
- Offer the voicemail in the options especially for non-working days and times.
- Avoid music that can be annoying or does not let the customer listen well to the options.
How to implement an IVR with Toky
To implement an IVR solution with Toky, you must be in the Business plan, have a virtual phone number and set up the service as the video shows:
After clicking the IVR option you can configure:
- A default option to which the client will be redirected if he does not select any option, and this can be to a specific agent group, everyone or to your voicemail.
- You can assign options 0 to 9 to redirect calls to a certain group of agents, voicemail or to repeat options.
After clicking on Configure Audios you can select audios for:
- Greeting: It is the audio that the customer listens to when a call is answered by Toky, it has the initial greeting and the menu options.
- Voicemail: It is the invitation to leave a voice message.
- Busy: It is the audio that your customers will hear when agents are busy.
- Hold: The audio is heard while waiting for one of the agents to take the call.
- Closed: It is the audio that is heard when the call is received on non-working days and times.
- Invalid option: This is the message that indicates the customer that he has selected an invalid option.
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