Welcome to Ask the Experts, brought to you by CloudServicesUniversity.com. In this video, Intelisys’ Cloud Evangelist Brandon Knight discusses how advanced IVR features save time and money while boosting customer satisfaction with IntelePeer’s Andre Davis. Learn more about CCaaS solutions from the IntelePeer team here: https://cloudservicesuniversity.com/supplier-directory/intelepeer/
| Brandon: | All right, guys. Welcome back. This is our next Ask the Expert. We’re actually going to talk to Andre Davis from IntelePeer about the advanced features of an IVR. Before that, Andre, how’s it going? |
| Andre: | Doing well. Doing well. Thank you. I’m happy to be here. |
| Brandon: | Good, good. Well, I’m glad you could join us. I think this might actually be our first Ask the Expert with you guys, so thanks for joining for this opportunity. Let’s talk a little bit about the IVRs. What do you seeing people doing? Even before I get to the functionality of it, talk to me a little bit about the importance of the IVR and how it plays a big role in getting that customer to the right place. |
| Andre: | Yeah, so having an IVR, it’s extremely important. I liken it to what I would say is first impression for any organization or enterprise. And so when you think about what impression that you want to give your customers or your end-customers who are facing–who want to interact with you on a daily basis–what sort of impression that you want to leave as they pick up the phone and dial your telephone number to reach you. And so with that, there are some skills–and some skills to the trade–in terms of how you actually build and develop an IVR where customers, when they call in, they can feel satisfied. |
| The main thing I think we were talking about before this is the identification and segmentation of the IVR. In other words, identify in advance the departments and the groups that you want to segment so that customers can quickly, when they call in to the phone number, that they can quickly select an option to then route directly to the agents who are best suited to handle that call. | |
| At a high level really, when you think about an IVR, it is the front end of your organization from a telephony standpoint. And you really want to simplify the IVR, and you want to give the customers the basic options and the best method to reach your agents or your internal employees. | |
| Brandon: | Great information. I know there’s a lot out there that people can talk about, Andre, when it comes to IVR and a lot of the functionality that we’re seeing across the board. If I asked you to give me your top two, what do you think are the top two most common things that advanced IVRs are doing to save customers time and money these days? |
| Andre: | Certainly. One of the more attractive features is virtual hold. You can imagine the customer doesn’t want to be in a queue, sitting on a queue holding too long. And the idea here is, really, is to give the caller the options to maintain their place in the queue and at the same time, while they can hang up or terminate their call and then allowing the system to call them back. That’s one of the very attractive features that benefit both the company and the caller that are calling into your interactive voice response. |
| The second feature is really speech recognition. And so you can imagine having a library of content that allows your callers to call in and effectively using the nuance speech engine to be able to verbally interact with the platform without the caller having to executing a pop or typing anything off their phone. Speech rec is … it’s one of the second well-recommended features that we’ve seen a lot of customers are very interested in. | |
| Brandon: | Well, thank you very much, Andre. As you can, guys, there’s a lot of possibilities and a lot of flexibility, quite frankly, with IVRs and how they’re set up. And even to the point of having the IVR interact with a person while they’re talking. And of course, that’s important because it saves time, it saves money from that live agent being on the phone. |
| There you are from IntelePeer. We brought you one more way that advanced IVRs are saving time and money, and that’s another way we’re helping make you the expert. |
