Giving your customers an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) menu can be a great way to guide them to the right person in your organisation. At the same time, when they are badly implemented, IVRs can be a nightmare to navigate, frustrating the customer and your employee who eventually answers the call. This week, we look at a number of typical mistakes and improvements for IVR menus.

IVR messages

Smaller organisations frequently take the cheap route of recording IVR messages themselves. While this is perfectly acceptable for a personal mailbox, the result can be unprofessional when used for the IVR of your main number. Here are some tips for professional IVR voice messages:

• Always start with a welcome message that clearly states your company and the purpose of the number: this sets the context and avoids most situations in which you have to tell your customer to call another number. But keep the message short and efficient, like “Welcome to the ACompany technical support line“.
• Use a professional voice actor agency. Voice actors have trained voices that you can choose depending on the image you want to build. A voice actor agency uses professional recording equipment, so you get cleaner and clearer messages that are easier to understand.

IVR options

An IVR can become a maze of twisty little passages if it has too many options. The following are a few tips to keep your IVR small, yet easy to navigate.

• Too many options in one IVR menu is testing for the patience of the customer: he will forget most options before the IVR has read option 5, so it makes no sense to offer more options. Try to split up large lists into parts that are related: “For product information, press one. For billing, press two.” instead of “For information about garden equipment, press one. For information about building equipment, press two. For questions about a bill, press three. For information about payment credit, press four.”
• At the same time, don’t make the IVR structure too deep. The customer eventually wants to talk to one of your employees: it makes more sense to keep the IVR simpler to avoid confronting your employees with customers who are frustrated by the complexity of an IVR that was supposed to help them.
• Don’t skip options. It can be very frustrating to hear an IVR that reads this message: “For support, press one. For sales, press seven.” Many customers will already have pressed “2″ before the message is finished.
• The correct way to read each option is: “For (choice), press (key).” If the customer hears the choice he needs, he can then pay close attention to the key number he needs to press to reach this choice. If the key is read first, the customer may not have heard it when the IVR continues reading his choice.
• In multi-level IVRs (where selecting an option in the main IVR gives the customer another IVR with more detailed choices), you should always program a button to return to the previous level. Usually, this is the “0″ (zero) or “#” key.

Customer input

If the customer has to input information into the IVR, either by using the keypad for numbers or by giving the information orally into a voice recorder, make sure that this information is always used. If the customer has just entered his 12 figure bank account number and the operator later asks this information again, the IVR will feel like a complete waste of time.

The offices are currently closed

Do not offer the same IVR to your customers when your offices are closed. Worst case, he navigates through your IVR and ends up on a phone that nobody picks up. Instead, start your callflow with a time and date check. In case the call is after hours, present your customer with the choice to leave a message.

As the ESCAUX product is structured modularly, we are able to bring you updates and upgrades on a regular basis. These include bug fixes, improvements as well as new features and implementations of support for new technologies. We keep our promises and have just introduced a number of changes in an update for our SMP web interface. Version 4.3 gives you the following new and exciting capabilities:

• Different levels of “Apply Change”: you can now apply a change to a single callflow, a single extension or a single SOP appliance. This speeds up the apply change process dramatically and it can save you time when trying out new functionality in a call flow, or when making small modifications to a few extensions.
• Visual callflow diagrams: when studying a callflow, you can generate a flow chart that shows how the callflow works. This is not only very practical to keep a high level overview of your work, but you can use it to document how your solution works. (Click the graph on the right for a full view)
• Bulk administration has been added for outgoing external number mapping.

Aside from these changes, the new SMP update also offers several optimisations and improvements. This update will be automatically installed. You will be contacted by our tech support team about this. We keep your IP telephony solution fresh and sparkling, today and tomorrow !