IVR as a calling feature has often proved to be beneficial for the business departments involved in attending customer calls. It significantly reduces the effort and time of the agents to manually transfer calls from one department to another, remaining stuck to their office desk/landline to attend calls and the list (of benefits) goes on.
However, besides all this, the “Press 1, Press 2” feature has many other advantages as well. One such is improvising business marketing. Yes, IVR for business marketing.
Business marketing has transformed completely in recent years and has become profoundly digital and highly competitive. Almost all businesses are adopting more or less similar ways (platforms and pitches) to grab the attention of their prospects.
In the midst of these several campaigns, voice calls/messages always take you a step ahead of other marketers.
Let’s face it, people are tired of seeing “sponsored” ads, random emails and SMS, browser notifications every day. High time we reach out to them in the conventional and more effective way!
Well, calls it is.
But, when we talk about marketing through calls, we’re not referring to employees manually dialling each number and pitching your product to random people.
We’re surely way ahead of this old-school concept.
Let me introduce you to the new-age ‘on-call’ marketing. Let me introduce you to a few ways to implement IVR for business marketing:
1. Miss call number: Let them ‘give you a miss call’
Certainly, missed call numbers are not amongst the latest trend and are being used by many enterprise entities. Be it for Airtel hello tunes, Lenskart store address, Giani’s discount coupon code, or providing bank account statement, miss call numbers have been used widely for different purposes.
However, looking at the increasing engagement of customers through these numbers, the concept has been spread across the verticals as well. And, besides enterprises, SMBs too have started to use miss-call numbers for their business advertising.
Well, if not anything else, but this 10 digit number (along with intriguing content and graphics) can significantly increase your customer responses.
This is simply because a miss-call number is often seen as a choice of big companies only. And this miss-call number along with your brand name is highly capable to take your brand value one-notch up.
This is how miss call number can be combined in your plan to use IVR for business marketing.
2. Tollfree number: Let them ‘call you for free’
With free calling, toll-free numbers (obviously) is what we imply! Surely, they have been in existence for many years, and, have been adopted widely by businesses of all size and nature.
Many of you might think of it as an unnecessary expenditure, old-school concept and so on.
Well, keep yourself in your customers’ shoes for once. They see your brand advertisement with 9254-XXX-XXX as the contact number and your competitor’s advertisement with 1800-XXXX-XX as the contact number.
Which one will you dial first? Surely the latter one.
- Because you’ll consider a brand more professional to have a contact number like this.
- Because you’ll have more credibility in this specific brand.
These are the reasons why in the age of free-calling, tollfree numbers are still the favourites of businesses aiming for good brand image, upgraded customer communication and more…
3. This time, let them ‘receive your call’ – Outbound calling
We have talked enough about ways to put forward your business pitch through calls coming from your prospects. But expecting all your target customers to call you in the first place ― isn’t this a little too much?
There are customers who might sign up on your website/ad but not call you. In this case, you can convey your message to them in the “modern and updated” way.
Record your voice message and pass it your prospects through outbound calls.
With an outbound calling solution, thousands of calls can be initiated automatically on the given list of numbers and the recorded voice message will play. Afterwards, you can ask for their response through the IVR menu.
Here’s an example: foodpanda has to hire many delivery boys located in different cities of the country. To avoid manual workload, they have set their hiring process on IVR service.
Outbound calls are initiated on the database, questions are asked in the form of IVR voice, like:
Press 1 if you have a bike
Press 2 if you don’t have a bike, and so on…
The answers are updated on the sheet in real-time and the recruiter can easily filter the best ones basis their responses. Hence, saving a significant amount of time and effort.
Well, there’s actually several IVR for business marketing ideas that could be implemented by you.
4. On-call survey: Let them ‘give their feedback’
Getting your customers to fill your survey is indeed a challenging task. No matter how many emails and SMSes you send them people won’t take out time to write down their views for you.
Well, they won’t write, but surely they won’t mind pressing a 1, 2 or 3 on their phone to answer your questions.
You can advertise your IVR number with catchy content, giving them an extra discount or freebies in exchange for them dialling the IVR number and filling in the survey.
Example: Call on 9212******, answer the questions prompted by IVR and get Rs 500 discount on your next purchase.
Alternatively, you can also feed your survey questions in the IVR menu and use the same in outbound calls, eliminating the need for your customers to call you.
Key takeaway on IVR for business marketing
The way marketing has been done by businesses and the way IVR system was used by them, both have been transformed significantly. This change has harbingered most businesses to adopt new-age ways to take a step ahead of the competitors.
The above-mentioned instances have already been used by many businesses, however, what’s important is that when are you planning to implement them in your business marketing?
Looking at the increasing competition and expectation of customers, I’m afraid you can’t afford to delay bringing change to your business marketing. You might think of using other ways, but, let’s face it, it’s harder to achieve your business goals when your technology won’t let you.
The longer you wait to use IVR for your business marketing, the more potential customers you’ll continue missing out on.
