Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Services
Your IVR can check a balance, confirm an appointment, take a payment or reorder a prescription in the time it takes a caller to find a pen. But only if callers can figure out how to use it.
Most people have a story about an IVR that didn’t understand them, asked the same question twice or sent them in circles until they gave up and shouted “Representative!” Those experiences stick. Callers remember them the next time they need to call you.
AI-powered auto attendants and IVR systems are often more dynamic than their predecessors, though they should adhere to the same basic caller experience best practices that have long served businesses well.
At BusinessVoice, we help you build an IVR that callers are glad to use. We design the call flow around what your callers need, write every prompt in plain, friendly language and record it all with professional voice talent. The technology does the work, and callers hear a company that knows what it’s doing.
Our Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Services can help you:
- Let callers handle routine tasks on their own, any time of day
- Cut down on caller frustration, repeat attempts and hang-ups
- Give your self-service options a voice that sounds like your brand
- Keep every prompt consistent in voice, tone and wording
How IVR Services Improve the Caller Experience
A good IVR saves time on both ends of the call. Callers get answers without waiting for an agent. Your team spends its time on the conversations that need a person.
When an IVR is hard to use, you lose both of those benefits. Callers zero out to an agent anyway, often already annoyed. Or they hang up and try again later, adding to your call volume.
Much of the difference comes down to words and voice. Your IVR platform decides what the system can do. The prompts decide whether callers understand what it’s asking them. A vague prompt, a menu with too many choices or a robotic voice can trip up callers even on a well-built system.
That’s where we come in. BusinessVoice has been writing for callers since 1989. Our on-site Creative Consultants know how to explain options clearly, ask for information in a way people can answer on the first try and keep callers moving without making them feel rushed.
75% of consumers say IVRs have forced them to listen to irrelevant options
Source: The Conversation
Benefits of IVR Services
24/7 Self-Service
Plenty of callers would rather handle simple tasks themselves, especially after hours. A well-designed IVR lets a credit union member check a balance at midnight or a patient confirm tomorrow’s appointment without waiting for the office to open.
Shorter Wait Times
Every call your IVR resolves is one fewer caller in the queue. That means shorter holds for the people who do need an agent.
Smarter Call Routing
An IVR can gather information up front, like an account number or the reason for the call, and use it to send the caller to the agent best equipped to help. Depending on your system, it can also pass that information along, so callers don’t have to repeat themselves.
A Consistent Brand Experience
Your IVR might contain dozens of prompts, often added over years by different people. We write and record them as one cohesive set, so every prompt sounds like it belongs, and like your company.
Fewer Abandoned Calls
Clear prompts and simple choices keep callers from giving up partway through. Fewer callers bail out of your IVR, and fewer hang up before they get help.
Our IVR Services
IVR Call Flow Design
We’ll meet with your Marketing, I.T., Customer Experience and Operations staff to learn why people call, which tasks your IVR can handle and where callers need to reach a person. Then we’ll map out a caller journey that gets each type of caller to a result in as few steps as possible.
Prompts for Speech Recognition
If your IVR lets callers speak their answers, prompts need to guide them toward words the system understands. We write prompts that tell callers what to say, give examples when they help and recover gracefully when the system doesn’t catch a response.
Professional Voice
The voice in your IVR may talk with your customers more often than anyone on your staff. We’ll help you choose a voice who fits your brand and sounds clear and easy to follow, even on a noisy cell phone call. Listen to our voice demos.
Recording and Audio Production
We record, edit and engineer every prompt to your IVR platform’s specifications and label each file, so your I.T. team or phone service provider can load them quickly. In more than 30 years and thousands of clients, we haven’t found a phone system or vendor we can’t work with.
Updates and New Prompts
Your IVR will change as your business does. When you add services, change policies or update your system, we’ll write and record new prompts to match the ones you already have. Already have an IVR with prompts that aren’t working? We can rewrite and re-record them, too.
What Makes an IVR Easy to Use
After decades of writing for callers, we’ve learned that small choices in an IVR have a big effect on whether callers succeed.
Tell callers what they can do right away.
Let them know early which tasks they can handle in the IVR, so they don’t wait for an agent they don’t need.
Ask for one thing at a time.
“Please enter your account number” works better than a prompt that asks for three pieces of information at once.
Confirm what matters.
Before processing a payment or cancelling an appointment, read the details back and give callers a chance to fix a mistake.
Plan for mistakes.
Callers will press the wrong key or mumble. A good error prompt tells them exactly what to do next. “Invalid entry” leaves them guessing.
Let experienced callers skip ahead.
Frequent callers shouldn’t have to hear every word of every prompt before they can respond. Ask your provider whether your system allows callers to interrupt prompts.
Keep a path to a person.
Some calls need a human. Make it easy for callers to find one, and don’t send them back to the start of the menu to get there.
IVR vs. Automated Attendant
An automated attendant greets callers and routes them to the right extension or department. An IVR system goes further. It can collect information, recognize spoken responses, look up account details and complete tasks without a live agent.
Many AI-powered options exist as well. If you’re exploring one, look for a provider that lets you influence the AI agent’s speech patterns, lexicon and voice.
Whichever type of system you use, callers deserve a positive caller experience and a voice that sounds like your company. We can help with any of them as part of our Automated Caller Experience services.
Why Choose BusinessVoice for Your IVR Services
Your IVR vendor builds the system. We make sure it speaks to your callers the way your company would. Our team has been dedicated to the caller experience since 1989, and we’re one of the very few pioneers of this industry.
Award-Winning Caller Experience Marketing Agency
No On Hold Marketing provider has been honored more often for creative and marketing excellence than BusinessVoice. Since 1994, we’ve earned 150+ awards from local, national and international competitions, including four Best of Show prizes. That same attention to detail goes into every IVR prompt we write.
Dedicated Creative Consultants
We’ll assign a Creative Consultant to your account on day one. They’ll learn your business, your systems and your callers, and they write custom content for your company instead of pulling scripts from an industry list. When you need new prompts next year, you’ll work with someone who already knows your IVR.
Experience Across Industries
We’ve written for companies in banking & financial, healthcare, senior care, manufacturing & industrial, automotive and more. We understand the questions your callers ask and the language they use to ask them.
One Partner for the Whole Call
We can also create your On Hold Marketing, review your full phone experience with a Caller Experience Audit and train your staff with Caller Experience Training. With one partner behind every step, your IVR, hold experience and live conversations all sound like the same company.
IVR FAQs
IVR is phone technology that lets callers interact with an automated system by pressing keys or speaking. It can route calls, answer questions, collect information and complete tasks like payments or appointment confirmations without a live agent.
We engineer and label every audio file to your system’s specifications and work with your I.T. team or phone service provider to get them loaded. In more than 30 years, we haven’t found a phone system or vendor we can’t work with.
Yes. We can rewrite prompts that aren’t working, re-record outdated or inconsistent prompts and add new ones as your IVR grows.
It depends on what your IVR does. A simple system might need only a handful of prompts. One that handles account lookups, payments and scheduling will need many more. We’ll help you take stock of what you have and what you need.
People can easily tell a human voice from a synthetic one, and they respond to them differently. A professional voice talent sounds natural and can match your brand and your other phone content. Some IVRs use a mix of recorded prompts and system-generated speech, and we can help you decide which prompts should use which.
Yes, and we recommend it. Using one voice across your auto attendant, IVR and On Hold Marketing gives callers a consistent experience from start to finish.
Yes. AI-powered IVRs can understand natural speech and respond more flexibly than traditional systems, but they still need to follow the same caller experience best practices. We can help shape how your AI agent sounds and what it says, including its voice, word choices and speech patterns, so callers hear a system that sounds like your company.
Yes. We’ll build a custom program around the size of your IVR, your goals, budget and timeline.