What do companies like Wal-Mart, General Electric, AT&T (News - Alert), and Hewlett-Packard have in common? Other than being renowned for their respective products and services portfolios, they are also classified as Fortune 100 companies.
Businesses to fall under the Fortune 100 category are typically the largest of those on Fortune magazine’s Fortune 500 list, a pre-eminent feature ranking the top private and publicly held businesses in terms of annual revenue. A wide variety of industries are represented on the Fortune 100, from oil and gas to financial services and retail.
But, something else these corporations have in common is the method they use to manage the hundreds of customer inquiries and calls they receive on a day-to-day basis. According to a recent study by auto attendant experts Parlance Corp., only 37 percent of Fortune 100 companies use live answer, while the remaining 63 percent prefer to automate their public system greetings with an IVR or speech recognition technologies.
Thanks to the latest IVR and auto attendant solutions, responding to customers in a timely manner has never been easier. It is now second nature for customers to use an IVR to book a flight, make a doctor’s appointment, check their bank balance, submit an insurance claim, and more. For businesses, an IVR solution can streamline customer service with a cost-effective solution that meets customer needs.
IVR solutions run on IVR platforms, or the hardware and software that provide the ability to play and record prompts, as well as collect input via touch-tone. Designed to solve each customer’s unique business inquiry, IVR applications exist on these platforms in order to control and respond to calls. In addition to gathering data, transferring calls, and prompting callers, these applications retrieve archived records and data that may be needed during the course of a call through back-end database and servers.
IVR platforms can recognize speech from callers via voice recognition capabilities, convert spoken words and phrases to a machine-readable format, and transfer IVR calls to the appropriate call center representative or telephone. Therefore, if a customer calls into a company like, say, Wal-Mart, he or she can be redirected to a specific department by simply stating “Shoes” or “Electronics” upon being prompted by the IVR.
As Fortune 100 companies’ staff and locations are spread across the globe, an automated answering system has become the go-to alternative for ensuring callers are tended to in a timely and efficient manner.
Edited by Amanda Ciccatelli