Site icon Ameyo

5 Easy Tips to Optimize Your IVR for Superior Customer Engagement

5-Easy-Tips-to-Optimize-Your-IVR-for-Superior-Customer-Engagement

Customer Satisfaction is something no business can compromise on in the present age. However, we often fail to understand that the first and indispensable step to achieve customer satisfaction is greater customer engagement. More often than not, customers attrite because they are not engaged properly with the brand. One of the easy ways to overcome this hurdle is to optimize the manner you deploy Interactive Voice Response System in your business.

We have enlisted 5 easy tips to optimize IVR and ensure superior customer engagement:-

#1. Keep a close watch to identify weaknesses and shortcomings
Take a look at your IVR script and listen to it closely. Do you think it is deficient in some areas or is there a potential blooper that might cause some serious damage to your business? Self-review is underrated and therefore, you need to regularly review your script to remove possible bottlenecks and weak points to make it sound crisp and clear to your customer. The best way to identify these weaknesses is to track the selections that customers make while interacting. It should also be noted that you might need to change the order, add or remove a part of the script when your business rolls our new products/services or discontinuing them.

#2. Fix your menu options to less than 5 and make it reflect customer preferences
Truth be told – a number of menu options can and will be frustrating for your customer. Often customers look for very simple and general information services. As the number of menu options increases, callers can quickly become confused. Therefore, it is crucial that you avoid overwhelming customers with a host of options and limit your menu options to less than 5. At the same time, customers don’t want to wait until the end of the menu to hear the option they want. Hence, it is crucial that you analyse the most important and popular options with your customers to determine in which they should appear. Customers should also be provided the option to repeat or go back to a previous menu.

#3. Customers should be able to speak to an agent by the third menu
We are humans and in times of emergencies, we rely on other humans to resolve our concerns. While your IVR should be designed in such a manner that it is able to address various issues but it should also have a provision to speak to a human agent, ideally by the third menu option. It is totally up to you to place this option right up-front or deep down the menu. However, putting the option right up-front would increase your call volume, and burying it deeper than four menus would reduce the operational costs but might also increase the number of hang-ups.

#4. Maintain consistency in brand voice and language
Companies should strive to maintain consistency in brand voice and language across all mediums of interaction. It is essential to use the same set of terms consistent with your company’s other channels like social media, web, mobile, print and others. For example, if an IVR prompt uses the term ‘customer troubleshooting for technical assistance, the same terminology should be used on Twitter customer service pages, the company website, and all other mediums. This approach is necessary because your customers will be able to feel that they are communicating with the same company no matter which medium of interaction they are using.

#5. Don’t overplay things

While revamping your menu options from time to time is a good strategy but doing it too often can lead to frustrating your customers. This is because frequent callers are used to a certain menu structure and they will surely hate it if you tweak your structure numerous times within a few months. A gradual approach is the best as it will let you to verify which of the changes made an impact.

What are some of the other measures that you have taken to optimize IVR? We would love to hear about your experiences on this subject. Do let us know in your comments. 

Exit mobile version