IVR to the Agents Rescue!

IVR-to-the-Agents-Rescue

To contact centers IVR is a boon which saves agents time and lets them provide quality service to customers with complex issues.

Businesses provide phone input options to callers so that inquiries can be streamlined and lead callers to the right automated solution or a human agent. Banks, financial services, education institutes, e-commerce websites, and healthcare services are among the few verticals that use an IVR (Interactive Voice Response System) extensively. As IVR is quick, it easily siloes customer calls based on their needs. For contact centers this is a boon as it saves agents time and lets them focus on complex issues instead.

This time we focused on the increased rush that ensues with each holiday season. The queries begin weeks in advance and customers call multiple times about information on different products. There are many shopping festivals, both in retail stores and on e-commerce websites and customers are willing to spend more but not before knowing extensive details about the products. How does one answer the same queries coming from thousands of customers with uniformity?

The answer: A heady mix of IVRS and agents

One thing that contact centers do during holidays is hire extra staff to answer the phones. The increase in call volumes cannot be handled with a limited workforce when calls are handled manually. Firstly, automation is needed, no matter what the scale of operation. Small and big enterprises both benefit from having an automated solution. After this step, contact centers do not need to hire extra people and increase operational costs. They can work quite effectively with the same number of agents.

Automation helps maximize productivity and efficiency by analyzing various aspects like average call times, average calls per hour, average agent availability per hour, average agent break time, office hours, peak hours, average calls per customer before reaching an agent, among other factors. With IVR, you can free up agents by letting the software answer queries for account information retrieval, flight information, pricing, record updates, new password or pin generation, and transaction processing.

A highly efficient IVR module provides Text-to-speech (TTS) integration, Automatic speech recognition (ASR) integration, database integration, scripting capabilities, 100% blind recording (with compression and multimedia operations), and e-mail/SMS/fax integration. Interactive services like TTS and ASR speak to the caller based on the input and automate functions that take up an agents valuable time.

Benefits of an IVR agent balanced contact center

Overall, IVRS facilitates better resource utilization for call centers and reduced wait time for customers. It will also allow agents to spend quality time on lucrative business interactions. Enterprises can therefore, pass on the cost savings to their customers in terms of better services and tariffs, only when they have robust call center software that allows for scalability and extensibility. Additionally, IVR solutions are increasingly being used to place outbound calls to deliver or gather information for appointments, past due bills, and other time critical events and activities. And that is why an IVRS makes the perfect holiday gift for your agents: it makes their jobs much easier.