There are many advantages to bringing advanced tech like IVR into your business.
Effective IVR is a pathway to maximum engagement at scale. Poorly implemented IVR, however, can damage your brand and customer trust.
It’s a superpower - but with great power comes great responsibility.
In this Telerivet article, we walk you through how to use IVR for best results and how to make sure you’re employing industry-leading solutions. We’ll cover:
- What is IVR?
- Our top 4 IVR use cases
- How Telerivet provides IVR
- Telerivet: Messaging when it matters
What is IVR?
IVR stands for Interactive Voice Response, and it’s a system that lets callers answer a series of questions over the phone without needing a human agent on the other end.
You've probably encountered IVR before. IVR is particularly popular in large commercial activities where companies have to engage with high numbers of consumers.
This is especially true in regulated environments, where there’s an added benefit to following a structured process.
You might see examples of this if you've dealt with a bank or financial institution recently, or if you’ve interacted with healthcare organizations.
Or perhaps you’ve had a lost luggage claim with an airline to work through. These large organizations need to be able to communicate with vast numbers of people for various reasons and use cases.
IVR allows a person to contact them—or be contacted by them—and then work through a series of pre-structured questions. This helps to gather qualifying or clarifying data to either resolve the issue directly over the phone through the IVR system or route the caller to the appropriate human agent to best address their specific needs.
One of the big advantages of IVR is that you can immediately switch the caller over to one of your in-house human agents.
This reduces friction in the journey and resolves the caller’s issue faster than many other customer experience pathways.
Top IVR use cases
As we’ve outlined, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) can be utilized—and is utilized—across a range of different verticals.
Though there’s no limit to the use cases or sectors in which it could apply, IVR can be used for, broadly speaking, any scenario that can be highly structured and follow a preordained pathway.
IVR works best as a conduit for further services.
Because of this, you often find IVR used as a qualifying process within a larger workflow.
The construction of this workflow, and the understanding of where it fits within a business and how it can be improved and iterated upon, often falls under the category of customer experience.
This customer experience journey is one that is highly optimized by companies operating at scale. For them, it has to be, because they have so many consumers engaging with them—whether it’s to record a complaint, ask for help, buy something, or whatever the system or purpose may be.
IVR sits within that journey and helps take a consumer from point A to point B—or more accurately, from point A to either B, C, or D—depending on the responses they provide.
And that’s where it’s effective. It keeps someone in the journey and extracts structured data from them.
The alternative is to either take someone out of the journey, requiring them to fill out a form on a different device (and perhaps not be on the call anymore), or to reduce the options even further and have them tap away at their number pad to select limited options—giving you less customization and specificity in how you build the flow.
In the following use cases, we’ll talk through the environments in which you might use IVR to help achieve your business goals.
What is IVR? IVR for customer support
Customer service is one of the biggest use cases for IVR.
An effective Interactive Voice Response system can dramatically improve a customer service setup.
Whether you're operating in customer support, customer service, or even customer success, you'll find use cases where IVR can be most helpful.
The big differentiator with IVR is its impact at scale. So, if you're providing customer support to large volumes of customers—or prospective customers—then IVR could be a very good solution for you.
When it comes to customer support, it’s probably even more important than with other use cases that you’re utilizing a top-tier IVR solution.
When people contact customer support, sometimes they just want a little advice or to be pointed in the right direction. But a lot of the time, their feelings are a bit stronger than that.
When people contact customer support, they tend to be frustrated. They can sometimes be angry—rightly or wrongly. They’re contacting support because they think that, potentially, something has gone wrong.
Customers' interactions with customer support are a hugely impactful variable in whether they churn or not.
A bad customer support experience can mean a customer moves over to a competitor.
If you have a poorly made IVR system in place—one that doesn’t understand what your customer is saying, that is slow and glitchy, or doesn’t provide accurate understanding or outputs—then you are likely to make your customers annoyed, angry, or at least disappointed in your service.
Customer support is an ideal fit for Interactive Voice Response, but because it’s such an important factor, you should make sure you choose a reputable firm with a strong solution—like Telerivet.
What is IVR? IVR for surveys
Another obvious use case for Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is the mass completion of surveys.
Surveys are great for this because they are highly structured, consistent, and many of the answers themselves are pre-structured and chosen beforehand.
There may only be one or two sections where you ask for a longer, more open-ended answer.
Surveys are perfect for IVR again.
This is the kind of use case you might see within a larger company or organizations where data is important. Larger companies tend to do more research activities—they have the resources and budget to properly plan and research in advance, to understand the market, and to adapt to that market.
I’m part of a large research study called Next Steps, carried out by University College London.
In this study, kids across different cohorts, over years, provide responses to a survey every seven years.
This is a longitudinal study, and every few years, someone gets in contact with me, gives me a nice little voucher or money off a certain purchase or product, and I fill in a survey.
I record my answers and wait another few years for them to contact me again.
The last time I took this survey was over the phone and utilized an Interactive Voice Response model to talk through the questions and record my answers.
After I answered, it would confirm the answer back to me before it recorded it. The system was smooth, and it worked well.
This must decrease the resources required to run a survey of this kind dramatically.
The human calling power required to ring tens of thousands of people and complete surveys with them over the phone would be very large indeed. Hence why the survey was run by the government. Now, of course, with IVR, you could run that same survey tomorrow.
What is IVR? IVR for general administration
This category of IVR use cases is a bit of a catch-all. It’s the miscellaneous category of the group.
Beyond the central purposes of support and surveys lies a world of more fringe use cases.
For example, if you're looking to book a viewing for a house or an apartment, it can be a slow process.
You declare your interest, wait for the agent to call you back, and you might already have other viewings lined up for different properties.
The whole process should be quick, but instead, it can take a long time and feel clunky.
If you utilized a voice response system, when someone declares their interest in the property, your system could automatically call them, work through a set of questions, and if they pass all the necessary qualifying checks, either provide them with a series of dates and times tied to a calendar for them to choose from, or, if they have further questions about the property, route them directly to the estate agent or realtor.
This allows the realtor to deal only with clients who need extra support, rather than every single person who makes an inquiry.
This is better than using an online form because any questions can be immediately sent over to the estate agent and placed in a queue to provide a live chat response.
A range of general administration use cases like this—where someone needs to take some details that may or may not be sufficient to complete the flow—makes IVR an almost ideal addition to that workflow.
The ability to immediately move someone on to talk to a real human is what makes IVR shine above other structured data entry formats.
What is IVR? IVR for accessibility
Finally, we can’t discuss IVR use cases without talking about accessibility.
Software has eaten the world. Services have increasingly moved out of real-life spaces and into digital ones for the majority of people.
While that shift may have both positives and negatives, it’s been a relatively easy shift for most to deal with. It doesn’t present a challenge in and of itself—although for some older people, it has been difficult getting used to new technology, and we consider them here, of course.
But most older people by this point have smartphones, smart TVs, and probably smart appliances.
The people who have found this shift to digital harder are those with other challenges.
People who are blind or have impaired vision can find it very difficult to navigate parts of the digital world.
And since many companies overlook the need for accessibility, these challenges often don’t get resolved.
Accessibility is often a winning category for mature software providers over startups. Startups tend not to have built out those extra features at an early stage, but anyone can build out accessible features.
The tools are there, they’re easy to use, and they’re incredibly valuable to the people who rely on them.
If you only provide standard digital forms in your company, then you’re going to exclude—or at least make things difficult for—people who are blind or visually impaired.
In the past, it may have been necessary to have a human agent to provide a service that is accessible for them. Human agents can be expensive, which can be a prohibitive cost for some companies, particularly startups.
But now, with Interactive Voice Response working as well as it does, it’s incredibly easy to build these features into your product—and cheap too.
The cost compared to the price of a human agent or a call center division is incomparable.
There is no excuse anymore for not trying to provide an accessible service.
How Telerivet provides IVR
Telerivet is your complete connectivity solution.
Telerivet does many things—Interactive Voice Response (IVR) included.
Telerivet works both as a connectivity provider and as a command center for other connectivity tools.
For example, if you want to build voice calling into your SaaS application, you could use Telerivet to provide the connectivity to make those calls work.
But if you already use Twilio for your voice connectivity, you could plug Twilio into Telerivet.
This is useful for many reasons. One is simply to have a unified command center.
If you’re operating across different countries, these countries tend to have different providers—and sometimes even different cultural practices regarding what platforms they use. With Telerivet, you can create different kinds of campaigns and replicate those campaigns so they operate in a unified, consistent manner across different channels, different providers, and different geographies.
This allows you to run an interactive text campaign, for example, that also works the same way across WhatsApp. Meaning, you can manage the same campaign in the U.S. and Europe, edit it in a single dashboard, but use it across different providers and channels appropriate to the markets you are active in, and the markets your customers shape.
Telerivet supports super apps that provide a huge wealth of services, including Grab, which is used by millions of users across Southeast Asia.
Due to Telerivet’s reliability, resilience, security, and flexibility, it is the go-to tool for humanitarian organizations and NGOs that need to operate in parts of the world where connectivity networks are limited or damaged.
Telerivet is relied upon by the Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières to work in the most difficult and dangerous conditions.
You should definitely consider Telerivet for your Interactive Voice Response solution.
Telerivet: Messaging when it matters
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