Call Centre IVR Technology Solutions

How You Improve Efficiency with a Call Centre IVR

A call centre IVR (aka Integrated Voice Response) is widely known as that annoying prompt to choose a number at the start of your call to a business that enables them to 'connect you to the right department'.

Press 1 to speak to sales, Press 2 to speak to service and so on. 

How does a call centre IVR work?

Most call centre IVRs use what is called DTMF tones - touch tones from a telephone - that require the customer to press a button on their mobile phone or landline to tell the IVR what their selection is.

The customer's selection is then used to route the call to the most appropriately skilled agent or queue. 

But of course, modern technology has now provided a lot more options.

Customers can now make a selection just using their voice using Voice Recognition/Speech Recognition technology or just say what they want without even being offered a menu (known as Natural Language IVR).

Based on their responses, the system will direct the customer to the right queue without any need to press a button.

It's not always necessary to connect the customer to a live agent or queue.

Call centres can often handle/respond to a customer enquiry without the need to speak to a live agent.

For example, a customer could call a bank and request a bank balance.

Using a combination of DTMF, voice recognition technology and even voice biometrics, the customer could be provided with their bank balance without any need for human intervention. 

So if a call centre IVR is so annoying to customers, why do companies keep using them? 

Call centres are often complex business units consisting of employees with varying levels of skills, experience, and expertise.

By using a call centre IVR to understand more about why a customer is calling, call centres can connect the customer to the most appropriately skilled agent.

This results in a better customer experience, as the customer can talk to someone best qualified to support them.

Call centre efficiency benefits include reduced transfers, talk time, and callbacks. 

But some call centres do tend to get carried away with an overwhelming large number of options presented to customers. 

IVR Benchmarking Data in Australia

The results from the Australian Call Centre Rankings, which conducts mystery shopping calls to Australian call centres each month, reveal some interesting data, including: 

• The average number of IVR layers for call centres in Australia is 2.1
• The Banking sector is the highest, with 3.5 payers
• Councils are the lowest with 0.6 (a number of Councils have no IVR at all)
• The highest number of layers was 6.0
• It takes an average of 28 seconds to navigate the menu options, with the Banks taking on average 51 seconds. 

Learn more about how to gain benchmarking data for your contact centre, and your competitors >

Search Call Centre IVR Technology Vendors

The suppliers listed below provide call centre IVR technology, enabling you to practically build your own call centre IVR using their software/dashboards and having it connect to the right queues, etc.

Just reach out to the call centre technology vendors below directly, or use the search filters to find vendors with other contact centre solutions.