Selecting an Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

When your business is not open 24 hours a day, servicing customers after hours of operation is an important business decision. By implementing or adding this system, it will give your customers more freedom. Interactive voice response can help your customers pay their bills with the aid of the virtual attendant, set appointments autonomously or even leave voicemail to any of your employees in the office. The cost of this service will depend upon the level of service you want to provide to your customers. There are two types of IVRs available. The higher the level of service that you want, the more expensive it is. No matter which type of service you subscribe, you need to make sure that when a customer calls in it will sound like one of your own employees.

First on the list is the basic interactive voice response. This is the cheapest and will give you bare essentials of telephone answering system. If the caller calls in after office hours, it will automatically greet the customer and provide information about your office hours. It can also be configured to provide instruction on how to transact business even after business hours.

Next, we have the advance interactive voice response. This system is basically most of the businesses use. It provides complex features. But also take note that this system does not come cheap. It is expensive and the pricing is also dependent on the features that you have chosen. It usually is the same with the basic one when opening the call. One key feature of this system is the ability of the caller to choose the service that he or she wants even after business hours. The caller can choose whether he wants to get technical support, gather information about his/her account, make payments, schedule an appointment, place an order or you can also build your own customized response.

Providing these services does not come without effort on your part. In order to provide this level of service specific to your organization, scripts must be tailored for your system to utilize. Every scenario must be taken into consideration to address each caller’s concern.

Interactive voice response is essential to almost all the business in the modern era. We just need to consider the current needs of the company and also prepare it for future use. With this, we can ensure the growth our business.