IVR Best Practices for 2024

People who call your business for the first time will likely use an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) menu. Call quality is better with this cutting-edge technology, which is in most IVR solution providers.

Make sure that the IVR menu experience for your callers is as smooth as possible. This will help with self-service issues and reduce the chance of calls getting lost.

Find out ten ways to make the caller experience better when they want to talk to a team member or talk about a problem by reading on.

Here are five great tips for making the IVR experience great:

Make your choices easy to understand.

When callers can’t get through to the person or business they want to reach, it’s a bad user experience.

By making your menu choices easier to understand, you can help callers quickly and easily find the information, department, person, or service they need without having to talk to a representative.

Because of this, your customers will eventually be happier, which will help your sales and bottom line.

You can help make sure that none of your callers get confused about which button to press by making your choices as clear as possible.

Whether people use voice or number presses to connect with your IVR, make sure that the experience is smooth and satisfying for all callers.

Make sure your voice sounds real.

You may have heard some IVR cloud solutions with strange voices or even ones that sound like robots made them. In any case, I think the experience didn’t make a good impact on you as the caller.

When a customer answers the phone and hears a voice that sounds like an old IVR system taped, they will automatically think the worst. You should try to give your IVR system voices that sound like real people because of this.

Sadly, most users think that IVRs don’t offer a great experience.

In any case, being honest will help the conversation with customers go more smoothly. Also, people are more comfortable, and problems are solved more quickly when the voice sounds like a real person working in customer service.

When you choose a voice for your IVR, you can choose between text-to-speech (TTS) voices, real voice talent, or a mix of the two. Pick the choice that works best for your business, audience, and field.

Allow people who call to talk to a real person right away.

Many businesses don’t want people who call to be able to talk to real people right away through their IVR options. Most of the time, it’s better to let customers use self-service options first.

But the worst thing you can do is lock your callers in an IVR “jail” where they have to listen to endless menus or different marketing tricks or where they can’t talk to a real person because they keep going around in loops.

Putting them through this won’t help you gain their trust, and it will probably make them so mad that they just hang up. A better alternative is to let callers quickly and easily get in touch with a live person.

In the event that the IVR system does not have a feature that meets their needs, please allow them to speak with a real person. Ultimately, not everyone will be able to use your system correctly or figure out which menu item to choose, no matter how easy you make the choices.

Some customers also don’t feel safe using IVR cloud solutions to talk about their problems. Because of this, it would be better to let customers talk to a real receptionist or agent who can quickly address their worries, make sure they understand what they want, or transfer the call to the right person.

Use the time you have to wait for raises.

Before a customer is connected to the person or food item they want, you only have a short time to try to earn their trust, as we’ve already seen.

This means that instead of just listening to elevator music, you’ll be using the time while people are on hold to help you reach your business goals.

Users should be asked to join through a number of different channels.

It goes without saying that you should use different tools or methods, like a hunt group or call forwarding, to quickly find the first available member of your support staff. This will help you keep callers happy and reduce the time they have to wait.

You might want to break up your promotional messages with useful ones that let customers know how long they still have to wait. This way, you won’t be annoying your customers while you promote your other ways to communicate.

To sum up

There isn’t a single IVR cloud solutions that works well for every type of business, as this piece has shown. The method you choose will depend on what your business needs and what it sells.

IVR solution providers can help you streamline the process, which will improve customer service and make it easier for your workers to do their jobs.