The Latest Trends in IVR for SMBs

Customer service is the most pivotal service for any brand. Whether the customers for a business will grow or reduce depends a great deal on the quality of customer service. Even though it is highly challenging for any brand to keep the customers satisfied, excellent customer service adds many advantages to its competitiveness. Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is the first point of contact for a customer, hence playing a crucial role. Looking at the vital role played by IVR, businesses must be aware of the latest trends in IVR and plan to adopt them. The IVR system offers valuable insights into the usage of technology for small businesses. Customer experience is one sector that an organisation can compete for in the commoditised world. Looking at the various benefits of IVR, many IVR services providers have come out into the Indian market.

Latest Trends in IVR for SMBs

After the emergence of machine learning and artificial intelligence, IVR has seen significant growth. With these advancing technologies, IVR has transformed to offer a far better experience to the customers. These technological advances accompanying data availability make IVR services much better. The following are some of the latest trends in IVR for small businesses:

• Rise of Conversational IVR

The emergence of conversational artificial intelligence and natural language understanding has made voice the most preferred mode of interaction. Conversational IVR follows a similar trend that has made it the most favourable point of contact among customers. It eliminates all the shortcomings of traditional customer service as well as the mammoth outrage from customers. In conversational IVR, even though customers talk to machines, it is still better than the DTMF Technology, where customers choose numbers to provide information.

• Understanding Customer Needs

Understanding the customers’ needs is of utmost importance for organisations to offer the best possible solution to their customers. In IVR, customers have to wait for a long time as organisations get detailed information about the customer and understand the reason for their calling. Such long waits make the customer frustrated. Understanding the customer needs and predicting their intent has become a lot more convenient with the use of conversational IVR. The NLP algorithms work at the backend to process the query and provide appropriate solutions. Also, as conversational IVR continuously collects more data, the predictions by ML algorithms become more accurate.

• Omni-Channel Communication

IVR has adopted new features to make customer service more capable so that customers can have frictionless communication across different channels, devices, times, and geographies. It is also adapting itself as per the changing communication preferences with time. As our day-to-day communication has changed from phone calls to text and voice, the same trend is being followed by IVR as well. The predictive intent along with the conversational interfaces helps in achieving omni-channel communication.

• Visual IVR

Visual IVR combines the on-screen interaction with speech and simplifies the experience of navigation for customers. It eases out the operation and offers more engagement. This enhanced engagement and convenience leads to customer satisfaction. IVR can provide options, depending upon the language, geography, previous interaction with customers, and many other essential features. The latest IVR system uses its full ability in order to provide customer service at your fingertips. IVR changes the options for customers as per their preferences, making the service interactive and easy to use for them.

• Analytics

Call centres use analytics tools to meet their business goals. It is crucial to collect data, and to make use of that data, some promising analytics tools are required which can discover the hidden pattern in the data. The omni-channel call centres have started using advanced analytics that help in getting the complete picture of the interaction with the customers. Analytics can help companies make their process more efficient through reduced average call handling time, reduced call volume, etc.

If you are already using the IVR system, you should adopt these advanced technologies and get ahead with time. Knowlarity is the best IVR service provider in India that you can contact to avail services for your business. It is known for providing services such as Cloud Telephony, Video Communications, Speech Analytics, IVR Services, and much more.