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conversational ivr

What is Conversational IVR and How Will it Help Your Business?

Sweta Chakraborty

09 January 2024

Conversations are what binds our society together. Then why are we leaving it out of our customer support system? Traditional IVRs have always been very monotonous, linear, and above all, lacked a specific display of empathy. Just tapping on numbers, waiting for the right option until the agent can be reached is really a process of yesteryear.

What is a Conversational IVR?

A conversational IVR is a solution that allows the customer to use voice commands or voice responses to interact with the IVR when they call the company number. It can be used to propel customer communications, promising a better quality of support. 

Your customers can now navigate through the menu trees with just voice commands. They no longer have to press numbers at the right time and delay the process. This is a progressive solution towards enabling self-service for customers. 

Conversational IVR works more efficiently as it runs on an AI-driven network. It learns and understands the concerned language's semantics and the niche to make the IVR more competent than traditional IVR systems. The conversation is not looped through different prompts but much more interactive as if they are speaking to a live agent. 

Due to Natural Language Understanding, the conversational IVR Solutions can comprehend complete sentences and phrases instead of basic 'yes' or 'no.' The software's adaptive nature makes it a more viable choice. 

The Benefits of Conversational IVR

 

Faster Resolution For Customer

Standard IVR Calling System makes the customers go through lengthy menus and then put them in a queue to speak to the agent. It's a tedious process that delays the customer from meeting a resolution. Instead, conversational IVR reduces the time required to serve each customer. The customer can dial in and share their problem and will be immediately met with a solution over a conversation. 

Lesser Escalations With Customers:

As conversational IVR Solutions is not human-dependent, it will always maintain the taught protocol. It will never shy away from company policies no matter what and ensure that the customer is treated with the required standard of service. Customers are also less likely to end up arguing with a non-human entity, therefore reducing the rate of escalations and unwanted negotiations.

Cost Efficient:

There is an average cost that the company spends to afford live agents for receiving inbound calls. According to an IBM report, it costs over $1.3 trillion to serve around 265 billion customer calls every year. That's a lot of money spent! However, conversational IVR Calling System won't charge you as much, and it will work more skillfully. 

However, a call center cannot run without agents, but the cost can be reduced by a smart interplay of conversational IVR and human agents. This can also boost efficiency. 

Customer Satisfaction:

The modern demography is more inclined towards automated solutions. People use AI-driven solutions in their daily lives now, be it speech recognition on Google or personal assistants like Siri or Alexa. Therefore, integrating conversational IVR is a step in the right direction. With to-the-point assistance, customers can immediately state their problem and get the answer. 

 

Better Insights:

As the conversational IVR Service is AI-driven, it will generate insights on what's working and what's not. It can also gauge what the most common customer problems are and how well they are being resolved. The modern IVR is versatile and will adapt to the customer's demands generating diversified insights into the customer's expectations. The backend dashboard will allow managers to make timely decisions based on accurate data.

Personalized Interaction

Your customer support team can add a hint of personalization to the conversational IVR system. Speaking with the customers in their local language, ensuring comfort and ease of use is a progressive step. This will delight the customer and is more likely to generate their loyalty. 

Improved In-house Metrics:

As customer wait time is reduced, you can serve more customers at a time. Above all, managers can use the insights generated by AI to predict customer demands and trends. Therefore, they can proactively take measures and offer a holistic experience to the customers. Customers can quickly call in for various problems, and they can be resolved without human support. This also ensures a reduction in abandonment rates and increases the IVR containment rate.

Conclusion:

The world is moving towards automation. From chatbots to virtual agents, the customer support industry has already adopted AI-powered solutions. The IVR Solution is the oldest form of support, and it should be modified to keep it running. 

Conversational IVR can be a modern yet fundamental asset to every contact center. It will improve the quality of customer service at a reduced cost. It ensures sophistication which also improves the brand's public image. With further advancements, the AI will bring more features to the system, leveraging for better insights and service. It is important to keep up with the trends to grab the customer's attention or be lost in this competitive market. 

 

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