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3 Top Objections to Using an IVR (And How to Overcome Them)

Katherine Buchholz Product Marketing Manager, DialogTech

Any business will tell you they want ways to simultaneously simplify the customer experience and improve internal productivity. But even as IVR (interactive voice response) systems help accomplish this, many businesses remain hesitant to use one for a number of reasons.

An IVR serves many purposes. On one end they automate simple tasks such as a customer’s account information or your business hours. They also help with more complicated tasks, such as qualifying callers and accurately routing them to the best agent to handle their call. Either way they are meant to help both customer and business alike. But let’s be honest, this isn’t always the case. A customer has a bad experience, becomes frustrated, and ends up voicing their frustrations on social media, for example. And employees are frustrated with having to deal with agitated customers and maintaining the IVR.

We’re here to set the record straight on three top IVR objections we hear from potential users, and how they can be overcome.

“IVRs are too complicated and require too much work from IT.”

While this may have been true of original IVRs – and, if we’re honest, still some systems today – it’s not the case with a hosted IVR. Cloud-based IVR applications make it simple for businesses to implement and use. And then you don’t have to worry about spending IT’s valuable time to program the system – it can be set up and ready to go in minutes by anyone. And when marketing needs to make a change to the IVR’s greeting, menu structure, or configure the routing? It gets even better – they can do it themselves.

At the end of the day, a hosted IVR system will help your business in three key ways:

  • Reduces operational costs. It minimizes the time your IT and marketing teams have to spend getting the IVR set up and maintaining the technology.
  • Improves how calls are routed. As the IVR extracts personal information and has callers answer questions, it determines precisely where their call should be routed.
  • Increases agent efficiency. Agents work more efficiently when qualified, sales-ready calls are directed to them, instead of wasting time re-routing calls to the agent they really needed.

“My customers consistently complain about my IVR.”

I know, I’ve complained about IVRs too. But that’s because they were bad IVRs. What does a “bad” IVR entail, you might ask? Think of that time you called a business and were sent to an IVR. You may have experienced robotic text-to-speech menus, menus that seemed to go on forever, an inability for the IVR to recognize what you say, or no easy-out way to be connected directly with an agent. Of course that IVR is going to annoy customers and make them complain!

The key to changing your IVR from a weakness to a strength is both obvious (based on the above paragraph) and simple: make it a pleasant and personalized experience for your customers. Technology has evolved, and with it comes the opportunity to make your customers’ IVR experience seamless. Take into account the following:

  • Don’t build your menus too deep. It’s tempting to create tier after tier of menus to thoroughly qualify callers, but you’ve been there and don’t want to have to dig through an IVR just to talk to an agent. Keep it succinct.
  • Use recorded scripts. Doing this you’ll have a more natural, human voice for your customers to interact with instead of automated text-to-speech prompts.
  • Choose a solution with accurate speech recognition. Some technology is better than others in recognizing the verbal responses of callers. Do your research and find a solution that is both sensitive to and confident in your callers’ responses.
  • Accurate routing. How well you qualify callers and set up routing rules based on their answers determines how accurately they are routed to your agents. Better routing equals a more seamless customer experience.

“I don’t necessarily want all callers to go through an IVR.”

We hear this a lot from businesses who run multiple marketing campaigns and already know where they want calls from these campaigns to be directed. Using call tracking technology, marketers can tie the call back to the exact marketing source that drove it – whether it’s an ad, keyword search, web page, email, direct marketing campaign etc. With this knowledge you can then have these callers automatically bypass your IVR and instead route them directly to a sales agent or group of agents ready to handle calls from a specific campaign. This is another way, in addition to using an IVR, that you ensure qualified callers are reaching the most appropriate sales agents.

A Few Final Tips for Success

At the end of the day, IVRs do save businesses time and money, but can leave your customers frustrated if not executed intelligently. That’s why you have to invest the time to ensure your IVRs are set up correctly and with the customer in mind. I’ll leave you with a few final tips to help you drive greater IVR success:

  • Observe where caller dropouts are occurring so you can improve the IVR process.
  • KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid and Succinct
  • Use your IVR to collect caller information and use this as a lead generation source.
  • Test, test, and retest (scripts, user patterns, etc.).

To learn more about hosted IVRs and how sales teams are integrating their call centers, check out our free white paper, “How Sales Teams Use Integrated Virtual Call Centers to Close More Business.”