IVR Deconstructed

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) can affect an entire organization in many ways. A main feature of an IVR system is that you can use it for a majority of calls for your business. This will help minimize the workload and stress on your skilled personnel and allow them to focus on callers that genuinely need their attention. A benefit of this is that a company can considerably minimize overhead and expenses while enabling employees to be more productive.

Another benefit is that IVR automation allows people to contact your company 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for every week of the year. Between this and the advantage mentioned above, your company can gain the important competitive advantage of superior customer service.

You can use IVR for retailer and manufacturer account inquiries or their order status inquiries, shipment locator, pricing information, and information/literature requests. If you are a financial service you can use IVR to provide account balances and history, transfer of funds, bill pay, interest rate inquiries, loan payment calculators, loan applications, credit card activation, and even branch/ATM locator.

Or you can use IVR for healthcare claims, eligibility inquiry, open enrollment, physician referral, test results reporting, facility and patient scheduling, or pre-admission certification. And the same goes for other insurance policy claims and/or questions.

Finally, you could use IVR to help people find out about their Human Resources benefits status, open enrollment, training registration, time and job reporting, job postings; a government tax refund status, tax filing, ticket inquires and payments, or assessor inquiries; and utilities billing questions, outage reporting, emergency notification, collections notification, or service on/off scheduling.

Regardless of what type of business you are involved in, chances are you can use IVR to lower your business costs, while increasing your employees’ performance.

IVR is an acronym for Interactive Voice Response. It’s a technology that automates interactions with telephone callers. Basically IVR integrates a company’s telephone and computer system, allowing the computer to become a voice computer. This then transforms a caller’s telephone into a terminal capable of directly accessing information and services.

IVRs answer a query one of three ways - by prompting callers to enter data using the touchtone keypad, by looking up the record in a database and by speaking back information. They can also ask the caller for information, accept the answers as they are entered on the keypad and store the information in a database.

Not surprisingly, many businesses have turned to IVRs as a way to decrease the cost of sales, service, collections, inquiry and support calls to and from their company. IVR solutions enable users to retrieve information including bank balances, flight schedules, product details, order status, movie show times, and more from any telephone. Additionally, IVR solutions are increasingly used to place outbound calls to deliver or gather information for appointments, past due bills, and other time critical events and activities.

If you are a business considering using IVR you will require a few essentials. First you’ll need an IVR platform. You’ll also need the IVR applications, back-end servers, telephone infrastructure and IVR experts to help you with the technology. But, you needn’t look any further than Plum Voice. We offer a combination of our own VoiceXML technology and complete professional services and we deliver telephony automation solutions that enable companies to exceed their goals and streamline their processes.