13 reasons why your business needs hosted IVR solution

Starting a new business is tough however managing business efficiently is the real backbreaker. And to manage business constantly; one thing that needs to be maintained is handling business calls as 80% of all business communications take place over a phone call.  

Surprisingly, most of the businesses fail badly in executing this task with corrective measures. There must be multiple reasons behind this setback however the primary reasons could be:

1. They are not aware of the solutions that can help in managing business calls automatically.
2. They are not acquainted with the benefits that this solution can bring to their business.

For now, let’s get familiar with this smart solution & 13 reasons why you should start looking for it. 

What is hosted IVR solution?

Hosted IVR, also called IVR, is a business call management system that is specifically used to route customer calls to the concerned department automatically. Further, you can also use it to give a professional voice welcome greeting to your customers. It is the backbone that helps businesses in automating their call handling process. Interestingly this technology does not require any hardware set up cost due to its cloud-based environment.

Top 13 reasons for businesses to start looking for an efficient hosted IVR solution 

1. Easy to set up & manage

Cloud telephony providers will set up your hosted IVR system according to your requirements for the first time. After that, you can make changes according to your needs without installing any software or hardware. For example, if you want to set up your hosted IVR service, all you need is to log in on your live dashboard and add the departments according to your business needs and it’s done. 

2. To bring call automation to your business

You must think, gone are the days when receptionists used to transfer customer calls by using extension dialing method; With call automation, customer calls can be automatically routed to the right departments. This will give three major benefits:

• It will save precious time for both of your agents and customers; due to which customers can connect with any of the agents irrespective of its time.
• Customers need not wait for their turn in the waiting queue as calls can be transferred to other agents available at that time.
• This will create a good brand image by making customer calling experience amazing.

3. Create a personalized greeting with hosted IVR system

The first thing your customers hear is your recorded IVR greeting, so why not make sure it’s perfect. With Hosted IVR you can upload a pre-recorded greeting, create your own, use our standard greetings or type in a message and convert it to audio file. With these options, you can make sure that your customers have an amazing first impression.

4. Reduce transfer error rate

Due to its zero error rate, IVR will transfer calls to the right departments without compromising its speed & connectivity. There would be no call holding process as in the traditional PBX system. All the process works seamlessly without any human intervention. Hence, makes a perfect customer calling experience.

5. Send the caller to a pre-recorded message

Add basic types of questions like “What are your business hours?” and “Where are you located?” to your IVR panel so that customers do not need to connect every time with an agent to get their queries resolved. If they still have questions, redirect them to the main menu using DTMF keypad tones. After that, they can either drop a voicemail in case of no agent availability or get connected with one of the available agents. This new feature will streamline the support process and allow your agents to spend their time helping callers with more urgent matters. 

6. Analyze your calling data via hosted IVR panel

By Implementing a virtual receptionist to your business, you can track your number of customer calls missed or receive in a realtime dashboard. Hosted IVR will fetch the complete user data in its IVR live panel & allows businesses to fetch customer data through API integration or in different file formats. IVR panel will also provide data regarding the number of customer calls received/missed by agents, call recordings,  customer calling regions, etc.   

7. Lead conversion optimization

Through hosted IVR service, companies can create an audio-based questionnaire. This will include questions that can measure the quality of the prospect leads. Further, these leads can be segregated based on their quality by making use of certain defined metrics. For e.g. ABC Pvt Ltd has run a small questionnaire campaign for its customer via hosted IVR; after that those customers answered simple questionnaire using DTMF keypad tones that include questions like:

“How much do you know about this product?

Press 3  if you are somewhat aware of our product

Press 4  if you are fully aware of our product

Press 5 if you are not aware of our product”

“Would you like to know more about this product?

Press 1 for Yes

Press 2 for No”

“Do you want to purchase this product?

Press 1 for Yes

Press 2 for No”

After that, they can assign these leads to their sales team basis on its value.

8. Make the customer experience awesome

Make use of this perfect tool to show the awesomeness of your business. Just add different hold music to your hosted IVR system & play music in each queue. Add as many as recordings, customized professional greetings, promotions, and upcoming events to your hosted IVR service. Subsequently, rediscover your customer calling experience. Hence, when their experience before they reach an agent is pleasurable, their impression of your company will be more positive.    

9. Extension dialing

Sometimes, your callers know exactly who they are trying to reach. So it allows your callers to bypass the IVR menus and dial an extension at any time. This useful feature will save your callers time when they know who they would like to speak to.

10. Attend customers calls even after business hours

You can easily configure business hours so that when all of your agents are away or are working remotely, calls can be forwarded to voicemail, or to an external number. Never miss a call or lose a customer, no matter what time they call, with this feature. Users can drop a voicemail message when agents are not available to answer the calls. Some examples of voicemail message

“Thank you for calling mycompany. Please leave a message with your name and phone number and we will return your call as soon as possible.”

11. Enhanced customer service & business efficiency

Hosted IVR systems let businesses amplify their company efficiency by introducing a call automation process in the workplace, this can reduce their customers on call hold time to a significant level. With its streamlined call handling process, hosted IVR solution improvise customer calling experience to a great amount.

12. Run surveys using hosted IVR solution

You can incorporate a hosted IVR solution into your strategy by creating a front-end information gathering system aka keypad customer surveys. This front-end system uses tones generated by a customer’s phone to direct a customer to the survey that’s most appropriate for them.

Again, more customers can be served faster with menu-driven systems. Questions can be tailored to the customer on the phone by linking to both internal and external databases.

Further, survey results can be used to gather product interests of customers that can be used to enhance customer experience.

13. Escalate your business revenue

Hosted IVR helps in improvising the customer on call experience which will definitely build credibility and trust in front of customers. In the end, this can result in increasing sales revenue.

Conclusion:

We know that Hosted IVR systems account for a significant portion of the customer calling experiences today. Even the top-notch companies are using hosted IVR software to boost their business. However, there are still many organizations that are yet to integrate IVR software with their traditional Inbound solution. Now that you know the many benefits of having a hosted IVR system, it will become even more clear that, to be a leader in the customer service and experience domain, the businesses need to deploy an IVR system sooner rather than later.