According to Mehrabian’s famous 7-38-55 communication model, listeners give a speaker’s tone and voice more than five times the importance of the words themselves when interpreting meaning. This is why choosing the right voice for your Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system is so important.
The right IVR recordings can improve the customer experience and make your call handling more efficient. Keep reading for tips to make your IVR system more useful and user-friendly.
Use the Right IVR Recordings
Using the right IVR recordings makes everything else about your system work better.
Choosing the right voice is one important factor. Computerized or robotic voices tend to be off-putting for your callers.
You want a voice that’s clear and professional. Your IVR voice is part of your brand. It should support the image of your company and your product or service that you’re trying to project.
Using the same voice throughout the IVR system supports your branding. It also gives your callers a more consistent experience.
You can try recording greeting and hold messages yourself, but you’re likely to get better results from professional voiceover recordings.
A voiceover service has state-of-the-art studio facilities to get the best possible sound quality for your audio files. You can be sure the recordings will be clear and sound professional. You can get recordings in a variety of languages to better meet the needs of your customers.
First Impressions Matter
Your greeting is a critical part of a more user-friendly IVR system. Most customers don’t like IVR, but your greeting can remind them that your company does want to help them.
The greeting should be natural and friendly with a tone appropriate for your industry.
A short greeting is better than a long one. Identifying your company is important, but a long sales message can frustrate your callers. Many Fortune 500 companies use a greeting shorter than 8 seconds.
Make Menu Options Easy to Navigate
Your callers are looking for a quick and helpful response when they call your IVR. Your menu options should be clear and easy to understand. A voiceover professional will give you a well-articulated text every time.
Having too many menu options can leave your customers confused and frustrated. You also want to avoid making callers navigate through too many sub-menus.
The general recommendation is to have no more than five options in the top menu. Each of those options should have three or fewer sub-menus.
A simpler tree structure helps your callers get the information they need more easily. They’re less likely to get lost in the system and give up.
Give Callers Additional Navigational Features
In addition to streamlining your IVR tree, giving callers some additional navigational features can improve their experience. Customers appreciate a clear indication of which key to press to return to the previous menu or the main menu. This lets them verify their choice if they’re uncertain or correct an entry error.
Callers also want to be able to skip ahead and choose their options at any point. You can show that you respect their time by letting them go directly to their choice.
Strategize Your Live Agent Option
Some callers want to speak to a live agent no matter how helpful the IVR voice is. They should always have an option to get to a representative.
You can use a simple test to find the best placement for this option. Provide the option earlier and monitor how much your call volume increases. Provide it later and see how many more abandoned calls you have.
Finding the balance between these two scenarios gives your customers the support they want without unnecessarily increasing your staffing needs.
Remember that although your main IVR menu may be available 24/7, your representatives aren’t. Personalized voicemail messages can help your callers get a reply and a resolution faster.
You can also use a callback feature if a customer wants to speak with a live agent when no one is immediately available. This lets your callers avoid waiting on hold or trying to call back during operating hours.
Analyze Your Callers’ Needs
Your IVR design should reflect your callers’ needs. You need to know why people are calling you and what they expect from your response.
Some companies design their IVR with business goals first instead of customers’ needs. Callers then have to wait through seemingly irrelevant menu options before they can finally get the information they want. Customers get frustrated and may abandon their calls.
Some phone system providers let you tag calls by subject. The distribution of tags will show you patterns in the frequency and volume of calls for each topic.
Analyzing this data will let you prioritize your menu levels, options, and order. You can place the options that callers request the most earlier in the tree. You can also adjust your staffing if necessary to handle certain types of requests.
Regular analysis of your system is important. You can adjust the structure of your IVR if your callers’ needs change. Eliminating or combining options that people rarely use helps keep your tree streamlined.
Don’t Forget Hold Messages and Music
Your hold messages and music are important components of your IVR. You can make call queues more useful for you and your customers by communicating information your callers may need.
Messages with business hours, upcoming events, or scheduled service maintenance dates are some examples. You can also include marketing messages or invite customers to follow you on social media.
Callers may sometimes be on hold for a longer period of time, and hearing the same message over and over can become irritating. Using several alternating messages helps avoid this problem. An engaging vocal delivery also makes waiting messages more interesting.
Hold music should match the image and values of your company. The wrong music can undermine your brand. In addition, annoying or unpleasant hold music can lead to abandoned calls.
Getting the Most from Your IVR
Implementing a more user-friendly IVR benefits your business and your customers. An effective greeting, the right IVR recordings, and a tree structure that your callers can navigate easily are important components.
You can reduce costs by directing calls more accurately and letting callers get the information they need more quickly. You’ll improve the customer experience and increase first-call resolution. You’ll have more satisfied customers.
For more useful tips like this, check out our other business articles.
