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IVR Service Provider Solutions: The Power of Self Service with IVR

By Mae Kowalke, TMCnet Contributor

In every customer service organization, there is a balance to be struck between providing live help by knowledgeable staff, and providing self-service tools customers can use to quickly and efficiently get information they need without hassle. Both are needed to retain happy clients.

Interactive voice response (IVR) is one tool that can be very powerful for self-service.

An IVR is, fundamentally, a system that allows customers to access information or assistance using voice prompts with speech recognition (in the case of phone calls) or text recognition (in the case of chat). Sometimes, the menu of options customers choose from leads to a live agent, and sometimes simply to information.

If well-scripted, points out inContact’s Carole Altman in a blog post, a self service IVR system can provide significant benefits to customers, and in turn to the organization—including service availability around the clock, even on holidays.

“It can also provide new services that could never have been cost justified if using real people; it can help to handle high call volumes; and enables customers to handle their own simple operations over the phone, such as pay bills, track shipping, verify specific account information, or make reservations,” Altman notes in the blog post.

Of course, access to information and service anytime is good for customers. But it also helps businesses operate in a more sustainable way, so they are able to offer more robust live or in-person service when that’s what customers need.

“The self-service IVR provides benefits to a business by helping to manage (and sometimes alleviate) the cost of agents spending minutes serving customers in person during the day, or manning the phones 24 hours a day to serve only a few calls overnight and at weekends,” Altman says.

This type of system is most useful for automating simple, repetitive calls, which often are handled more efficiently—both for the customer and the business—by an IVR than by a live agent. The IVR frees up human agents to help with more complex inquiries, avoiding frustration on both sides.

“The right tools can help reps conduct more effective customer dialogues and identify best next actions using real-time data,” notes one commenter to Altman’s blog post.

Self-service IVR has a wide range of applications, including voice-activated dialing to automate routine enquiries and reduce caller waiting time, televoting for popular reality TV shows like American Idol, anonymous access to information like medical test results, conducting research for medical clinical trials, and outbound calling from sales organizations.

IVR is also used as a self-service tool for a variety of mobile applications, including banking, making restaurant reservations, post credit card payments, remote meter reading for utilities, checking flight information, and accessing weather-related updates like road conditions or school closings.