How Smart Marketing Agencies are Leveraging IVR
Whether it’s a holiday season or peak time for a specific business, call center managers are going to experience periods of high-volume traffic…there’s simply no way around it. Here’s how it normally works: Calls begin overwhelming a call center, agents become inundated and customers begin to express frustration… it’s an ongoing, self-fulfilling vicious circle. In response and to successfully route calls to the right agent, marketing agencies have begun offering Interactive Voice Response (IVR) software, which “talks” with customers via menus, recordings, voice prompts and touch-tone telephone keypad entries.
What we’ve found through some investigative research is that though the IVR accounts for some 27-percent of the total call experience, once it’s implemented by companies and agencies, only seven-percent currently offer an IVR solution that successfully MIRRORS – and at times EXCEEDS – the live agent experience. What does this mean? If you are in charge of a team of marketers at an agency and would like that team to use an IVR to provide a top-shelf customer experience, you have to ensure that its configuration is optimized.
Here are three tips smart marketing agencies that are successfully leveraging IVR offer those considering the Interactive Voice Response route for a call center or other similar application:
- Rest Assured Knowing Customers are Ready for Automation: If you find yourself skeptical about replacing human-to-human contact with a human-to-robotic-esque solution, fear not – the truth is that the majority of customers are comfortable with, and often times prefer depending on industry, automated processes. Remember, they already use automated processes in their everyday activities, from making credit card payments via telephone to selecting from a series of prompts to connect to the right service rep. If you optimize its configuration, you can rest assured knowing that your customers will navigate their way through the IVR landscape.
- Choose an IVR That Can be Personalized: Companies expect their agents to provide personalized service to their customers, so the same should be expected from IVR; by leveraging enhanced caller ID, integrating call center software with existing CRM platforms and creating customized greetings, messages and prompts, customer service is kept at an intimate level.
- Understand the “Hello” is not Enough: Choosing software that not only greets and routes callers but aggregates salient customer data is vital when selecting an IVR. This approach is leveraged by ensuring call center software solutions and IVR do most of a team’s dirty work when it comes to obtaining relevant metrics.
The IVR market is exploding, especially because of the technology’s ability to increase first call resolution. Are YOU leveraging the best IVR system for YOUR clients and their customers?
How to Adopt Marketing Automation as an Agency
So as an agency where do you begin? How do you implement a digital marketing agency solution? We have a white paper and it outlines:
- What marketing automation brings to the table
- How to deploy it first for your agency
- Options on billing clients for marketing automation
- New service lanes that you can add through use of this technology
