Business

How IVR Services Can Help You Grow your Business?

One of the toughest jobs in the world is perhaps that of customer care executives. They have to deal with the anger and sometimes unusual queries of the customers and have to satisfy them all the while luring in hot leads. But despite giving their 100%, they often fail to hook the hottest leads then and now. Why? The reason being, not being able to connect with them on time! It often so happens that all the customer support agents are busy on their calls with valuable clients and cannot answer those waiting in line. The cost of these missed opportunities is unimaginably high.
 
What’s the solution? After all, agents are only human and cannot simply be at 2 places at the same time. So, many businesses make a decision to hire more agents to meet all the possible calls they get. But is that really a sustainable solution? This not only needs a large budget to sustain a large number of employees but also calls for expensive real estate and types of equipment to facilitate a work environment for them. Furthermore, there are additional facilities that companies must offer for their 24-hour operations of customer support staff; like overnight pick-ups and drop-offs and keep their offices running for 24 hours a day. All of this may account for a huge investment requirement that could be very useful when put in some other sector of your business. 
 
But lost leads cost high! A good solution is to simply invest in an IVR solution and have a virtual receptionist working for you, round the clock, 365 days. The way an IVR system works is, you feed a series of questions and menus for the callers to choose from when they place a call to your company. Based on the inputs or responses they offer, the IVR system routes the calls to desired departments and agents skilled enough to handle the caller’s query or complaint in no time. 
 
However, while this is a seemingly easy solution and most of us has interacted with a virtual receptionist at least once in our modern lives; many fear the system may be too robotic and impersonal or compromise client experience. The trick to getting past all those slippery slopes with the IVR system is to keep the menus and navigating questions, simple, straightforward and limited in options. That way, callers can jump quickly to their desired section of the query without needing to manoeuvre through complex menus and long options lists. Thereby, saving time and frustrations for callers, and acting fast to keep the work process streamlined.
 
Now you may have the question, if the IVR system fastens the process how will my customer support team meet the rushing demands. The problem of agent crunch is also easily solved with a virtual receptionist as the IVR system does most of the heavy lifting for them. Once the caller has been routed to the desired agent fit for the job, the details of most parts of the query or complaint of the caller have already been gathered and await the final touch of human intervention. For many cases, the callers may not even need to speak to an agent as the virtual receptionist can be programmed to address the situation on its own without needing any human help. This works great for the downtimes when no agents are available for work like holidays and leaves or even lunch hours or during late night. 
 
Apart from that depending on the IVR service provider, you choose to go with, several additional monitoring and data-driven features can also be availed to keep client communications in check and monitor customer feedback. Like the following:
 
  • Personalized, appealing messages to greet callers. The message can be customized regularly depending on the season, special announcements or offers that need to be conveyed or special wishes during the holiday season. 
  • Monitoring live client calls for reviewing the performance of agents and to gather customer’s feedback and reactions. Getting real-time updates helps businesses improve their customer communication strategy and rework scripts that are not working. 
  • Get a glimpse of callers’ requirements to formulate campaigns, offer special deals or bring forward new services, products or features. Most IVR systems come with a secure backend log where such important caller details are stored for future use, analysis and communication. 
  • Many times, clients may have urgent needs and may not want to wait to reach the right customer care agent to talk things out. For such cases, modern IVR services also offer the feasibility to directly talk to a specialist without waiting for menus to lead to the right person. For instance, if you offer services like Bulk SMS, Email Marketing and Web design, and each department has a specialist agent handling calls, then the menu can easily route the calls to the right agent for the caller looking for any one of the three services.
So, there you have it, an IVR service is much more than cost-saving for a business, it boosts productivity and efficiency of customer care agents, improves caller satisfaction and client engagement through organization and also lets them know you mean business when you pay such attention to detail in communications. Are you ready to try it today?