So what are the benefits of IVR for your organisation I hear you say? For customer service professionals, call centre operators and strategic decision makers, IVR has given them the flexibility and competency to differentiate themselves from their competitors and deliver a best in class customer service through an integrated plan of customer touch points.

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How can IVR help increase customer satisfaction?

Interactive Voice Response technology a telephony technology used mainly in customer satisfaction and support departments as well as international call centers.

The technology itself enables a customer to use a touch tone telephone to interact with a database with pre-defined questions and answers to determine the best route to resolve customer complaints/feedback and acquire information to enter into the database in which it sits.

Background

IVR is enjoying somewhat of renaissance and will become an even more influential technology for organisations to add value to their customer satisfaction departments in the future.

Having been around since the late 1960’s and adopted for business use during the 1970’s, the technological advancements in speech pattern protocols such as CTI and ASR, increase computing power per chip and contact database integration means that organisations that use this technology can quickly identify a client’s call history, profile and relationship status before interacting with a human representative of your customer satisfaction department or call centre.

Current Situation

According to Global Industry Analysts Inc., the world speech technology market will reach a staggering $20.9 billion by 2015 an although the industry itself will not return to growth rates experienced before the recession, there are several technological indicators and functional/price benefits that position this technology for a more involved future within the IT infrastructure of organisations.

Furthermore, by harnessing this technology early, you can keep ahead of the competition as IVR solutions are generally used as a cost-effective method to reduce your call centre costs and give you the flexibility in human resource to manage and co-ordinate your customer experience programmes across geographical regions.

As Prashant Lamba, director of business development for Phonologies (India) Pvt. Ltd., commented in his recent study, “Organizations are expected to quickly reduce costs and increase agent productivity by adoption of Unified Communications solutions, however, companies will expect that standards within the contact centre to still remain high.”