When you're looking for ways to take your business to the next level, you might not immediately look to your customer service department for areas of improvement. After all, unless you have active customer complaints about your agents or your online reviews besmirch your brand's service quality, that must mean that your department's working as intended, right? Unfortunately, that's not always true.
In fact, you can always improve your brand's customer service and the overall customer experience with the right software and tools. This includes interactive voice response (IVR) technology. To understand how voice recognition software impacts your brand, here's what you need to know.
Voice recognition helps guide customers to the right agent.
Have you ever called in to a customer service department, navigated a pre-recorded menu, and waited on hold only to realize you'd reached the wrong person? As a customer, it can feel a bit demoralizing. Because of this, you must avoid these customer pain points whenever possible. However, it also benefits your agents by enabling them to focus on areas of expertise and provide specialized, high-level service to every caller. With interactive voice recognition software, you can reshape this customer journey and make it more intuitive.
While automated phone menus are nothing new, voice recognition systems make it much easier for your systems to collect essential customer information, provide account details, and handle simple tasks without the need for a customer service representative. Then, as a customer progresses through an IVR menu, you can provide a better customer experience using speech recognition and call routing to direct the caller to the appropriate live agent.
Interactive voice response is convenient for the customer.
Nowadays, convenience is king, especially when you're talking about your customer interactions and touchpoints. Your interactive voice response helps provide added convenience that makes it easier for customers to interact with your systems and spend less time navigating IVR menus and contact center recordings.
IVR technology can also help you schedule callback times if a customer doesn't want to wait on hold. The right IVR system can help improve the customer experience and streamline your call center activities. Plus, conversational IVR is much more approachable than other call center automation techniques. For stronger customer satisfaction, an interactive voice response system can help you navigate high call volumes and address customer concerns outside of business hours, too.
IVR systems make you more flexible.
Since customer needs aren't limited to traditional business hours, your IVR software must empower your brand. Say, for instance, you run a custom cabinetry business. Your prospective customer calls outside of business hours and tells you they've been looking at kitchen cabinet stores in Phoenix and have a time-sensitive project.
Normally, you'd have to wait until you received the customer's message to build a quote. However, with the right IVR system and CRM integration, you can collect information that can help you build a quote, determine the size of a project, and speed up your response times. With the right call center system, you can even set priority levels for your integrations and limit the notifications you receive outside of standard business days. That way, you can still receive warm leads, but you won't be notified when a customer uses the IVR system to check an account balance or an order status. This is especially useful when customers have hard deadlines or request quick turnaround times.
With the right IVR systems, it's that much easier to empower your business, collect customer data, set callback options, and work with your customers to meet their unique needs. By investing in a smart IVR system or IVR solution, you're investing in the long-term health of your business.
