A well-scripted IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system can provide significant benefits to customers by offering services around the clock, 24/7, including holidays, saving a business time and resources. It can also provide new services that could never have been cost justified if using real people; it can help to handle high call volumes; and enables customers to handle their own simple operations over the phone, such as pay bills, track shipping, verify specific account information, or make reservations.
Apart from benefiting customers, the self-service IVR provides benefits to a business by helping to manage (and sometimes alleviate) the cost of agents spending minutes serving customers in person during the day, or manning the phones 24 hours a day to serve only a few calls overnight and at weekends.
A key benefit of self-service IVR is to remove and automate the simple repetitive calls, allowing agents to handle the more interesting, varied and complex calls, i.e. those requiring skills beyond the capability of a computer. Very often some of the simplest calls are also some of the most frequent and can take up a large portion of the agent’s time over the day.
