What Is An IVR (Interactive Voice Response)?

At the simplest level, an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) is an automated interface that allows you to interact with callers to collect data, and solve a problem without having to direct the caller to an agent. For example, know the balance of your account.

Why Do Contact Centers Use IVRs?

Some of the main advantages of an IVR in a call center environment include:

1) A more precise definition of the needs of the user and, therefore, selective routing, thus increasing user satisfaction and reducing the need to put the call back or transfer it. Thus, if a user wants to know the status of his account and calls the bank, the IVR will give him several options, among them, “balance inquiry”. This selection will redirect the user to an agent of the call center who will be able to solve his query immediately.

2) Automation in the collection of basic user data shortens call-handling times and frees agent resources to manage more complex interactions.

3) The ability to automate some basic interactions, reducing the rotation of agents and increasing the availability of these automated interactions to offer a 24/7/365 service.

These advantages are just a small sample of how an IVR can add and automate simple tasks that make a big difference in the user experience.

At a more technical level, an IVR is an automated system that allows users to interact with the customer service system of a company through a configurable voice menu or keyboard. It serves as a pre-filter for incoming calls through a menu of options available to the user. IVRs are often used in call centers; where data collected from users and menu selections are used in an automatic call distributor (ACD) to route incoming calls to available agents and properly qualified.

Basic IVRs often use DTMF (dual tone – multifrequency) to accept input, a method that is also used to dial telephone numbers. Widely used for telecommunications signaling, it allows the calling user to perform some basic interactions with a telecommunications platform through the use of their telephone keys. Examples for this type of basic interaction include menu selections (“Press 1 for Sales, 2 for Service”) or simple data collection (“Enter your five-digit user number”), etc.

Nowadays, a simple IVR is still used in many contact centers. However, voice portals that offer more sophisticated functionality, such as text-to-speech (TTS) conversion, automatic speech recognition (ASR) and mobile application integration, are increasingly replacing the DTMF approach, something limited and not very user-friendly.

Along with other tools, such as the integration of databases, this allows the automation of more complex interactions and / or natural interaction with the caller. The boundaries between voice and digital channels are blurring, for example, in a visual IVR where the interactions that were originally voice calls are transformed into a web-based interaction when the caller uses a smart phone.

In the future, automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are expected to play an even more important role, both in the traditional front-end by converting the previous IVR into a fully automated interaction platform that intelligently learns to increase its scope, as in the back-end, as a support tool for the agent.