Guidelines for building a Smart IVR for your Business

Guidelines-for-building-a-Smart-IVR

Building a Smart and Intelligent IVR is a complex procedure and requires great deal of understanding of the human psychology, business processes/domain, and customer life cycle. If you do this effectively, only then you will be able to anticipate a caller’s need and deliver a differentiated experience to the customers. The call flow design of an IVR has to be structured in a way to attain the desired outcome of providing excellent customer experience.

Listed below are few things you must consider before starting to design an IVR:

Know your Customers Thoroughly

Gain a knowledge of your customers with proper segmentation of customer profiles  in terms of demographics, preferences, and value based segmentation. Track when and how do they contact you- their preferred channel of communication, time of call, etc. And also, why do they contact you, list out the reasons- is it related to complain, issues, upgrades, faults or others.

Go for Simplicity with Meaningful Options while Designing

Avoid confusion among the callers by keeping the options simple that hit right at their needs. If your Call Center IVR is not able to cater to the caller’s need or is providing them with an unwanted solution, then this will lead to customer frustration to a great extent.

Also make sure that the design is not over complicated with lots of options in the menu that confuses your customer and make it hard for them to navigate and find a solution. The design should be such that it does not create a burden on your IT team neither does it irritates the customer.

Build an Architecture that Supports Business Agility

Make sure that your design architecture is able to adapt to dynamic business needs with a minimal turnaround time. It should not require much change in the core IVR design with change in business logic.

Improving the Customer Experience with Smart IVR Analytics

It should be an end-to-end call assessment solution that captures, tracks, and evaluates every caller’s experience during the entire call and create customer dashboards to quickly and accurately measure effectiveness. Smart analytics can help organizations in identifying various IVR issues and make those modifications or enhancements to its current IVR solution accordingly in order to make it easy for customers to use.

Ensure that you measure the effectiveness of your IVR by correlating the IVR performance analytic outcomes with customer surveys.

If well thought through and perfectly built, an intelligent IVR system can definitely help organizations gain competitive edge by delivering superb customer experience hence ensuring increased brand loyalty.