What is IVR and How to Use it in Your Business Phone System

IVR systems are an excellent way to elevate your quality of customer service without breaking the bank or increasing your staffing levels. It allows you to offer your customers self-service options and project a professional image that’s sure to impress them.

Also known as a virtual receptionist, this system greets customers, offers basic assistance, and routes each call to the right team members everytime. It’s an essential element for any modern small business or entrepreneur to ensure customer satisfaction and retention.

But just what is IVR, and how can you leverage it to enhance your business communications?

Interactive voice response, or IVR, is an automated phone system feature that enables callers to engage with a computer-operated system based on their input from a keypad or voice responses. These systems are so commonly used, it’s likely you have interacted with a virtual assistant over the phone numerous times without thinking about it.

IVR manages inbound telephone calls by gathering information about the customer inquiry prior to transferring the call to the correct department.

An IVR system typically answers incoming customer calls and provides a menu of next steps for the caller. Then it routes customers to the right agent or department based on their responses, or provides answers to commonly asked questions. The process works like this:

An IVR system is a feature included in the best voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) phone systems. It greets customers, offers menu options, and acts on menu selections and information gathered from the caller. For example, at the beginning of a call, prior to playing a welcome message, it may ask the caller to “say or press one for English.”

The system uses the information provided by the customer to:

Auto attendant IVR systems offer many benefits for customer support such as:

LinkedPhone’s Virtual Receptionist is a professional-grade feature we provide to all our customers, free of additional charge. You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars for a professional, feature-rich, corporate-grade phone system, costly equipment, IT staff, or complex manuals. Best of all, our Virtual Receptionist only takes a few minutes to set up and customize online or with our mobile app.

Here are some of the benefits offered by our Virtual Receptionist feature:

The ability to create a custom call menu used to cost small businesses thousands of dollars, but now it’s available with a LinkedPhone subscription for less than $20. A call menu allows you to automatically route callers according to their need. Customers can select the number that corresponds with what they are seeking, for things like store hours, customer service, billing questions, voicemail, or company directory.

When you have a LinkedPhone business phone number, all devices linked to your number only ring during your designated business hours. Then you can configure our Virtual Receptionist to handle calls differently during the hours when your business is closed. For example, if specific call types are typically routed to human agents during business hours, these calls will receive a custom voicemail greeting for closed business hours and be routed to voicemail for that department during off hours.

LinkedPhone’s Virtual Receptionist screens calls for you when you’re using your mobile device for business calls. It helps you differentiate between business and personal calls by displaying the name of the person calling along with the menu option they selected, if applicable. This gives you insight into what the call might be related to.

LinkedPhone’s automated attendant gives you the ability to set up a pre-recorded welcome greeting along with a list of call menu options. Your business welcome greeting tells callers they’ve reached the right number and presents a professional image. There are three ways to set up your company greeting:

You can even use our in-house professional voice talent, available to all our customers at a reasonable cost. All you need to do to take advantage of this service is contact us with your script and preferred voice selection. We’ll reach out to you and get you the best pricing possible.

Our IVR system enables you to route incoming business calls to the right individual or team, just like big companies you’ve called where you had the option to press a corresponding menu number to be transferred to customer service, billing, or technical support. LinkedPhone’s Virtual Receptionist routes business calls to office IP phones, landlines, and mobile devices. You can even use your laptop or desktop computer to talk and text.

When routing calls to a team, all phones simultaneously ring until a team member picks up the call. But you also have the option to select Sequential or Round Robin Call Routing, so calls get evenly distributed to individual team members. Then, if all members are on the phone, the caller is placed in a queue with hold music until a team member is available to take the call. You also have the option to direct calls to voicemail after a designated period of hold time to prevent missing important calls.

LinkedPhone’s IVR feature also allows you to record informational messages for callers to hear while on hold or after hearing your business greeting. This enables you to promote upcoming events or special sales, promotions, changes to your website or service offerings, and general business updates. Your recording options are the same as with your business welcome greeting and include your own voice, text-to-speech technology, or an uploaded MP3 file.

Business voicemail is easily accessed on the LinkedPhone mobile app or your email address. Our customers find this handy since they often check email frequently throughout the day. We also provide you with automatically transcribed voicemail at no additional cost so you can read messages at your convenience.

A company directory is automatically created for you as you add team members to LinkedPhone, saving you the time of building or maintaining a company directory manually. As team members join or leave your company, all you need to do is add or delete them from the system. Plus, your LinkedPhone company directory makes it easy on callers by allowing them to search for team members by name or by extension.

Our multi-tier call menu allows you to create a sub-menu for each team or department within your business. For example, in the customer service department, you can distribute calls according to a specific need such as product support, billing, and technical questions. This boosts first-call resolution without the need to transfer customers between associates to get the help they need.

When configured properly, IVR systems can help boost call center efficiency and service quality. For example, the self-service aspect saves labor costs and reduces the number of calls routed to each service agent. Some calls are routed to pre-recorded informational messages to answer common questions and others are then routed to specific agents based on the customer’s requirements.

When integrated with other systems, an IVR phone system can deliver relevant information based on caller responses and deliver it to agents. This gives service personnel advance context around the customer’s needs without asking the caller to reiterate the information themselves. This creates a better customer experience.

An IVR call center also allows you to use different phone numbers in different advertising methods, then play different greetings and menu options for incoming calls based on the number called. This option also allows you to publish different phone numbers for each department if you choose.

Selecting options on a keypad used to be the only way for callers to choose their menu option, but newer, more advanced IVR solutions use speech recognition and natural language processing (NLP). Artificial intelligence (AI) technology allows callers to speak their selections aloud to the IVR system, providing a more natural and efficient experience for customers, and eliminating the need to listen to an entire list of menu options.

This type of intelligent IVR can also understand other information such as email addresses and account numbers, further enhancing the self-service options you can offer to callers.

Private Branch Exchange, or PBX, systems became popular around the middle of the 20th century, enabling employees within a business to call one another internally within the same office. These PBX systems were like private telephone exchanges that resided within a company’s physical location. Everyone in the office had an individual handset connected to the system, allowing them to make and receive calls on the organization’s internal analog telephone network.

If the company had a business welcome greeting or menu options on a PBX system, a complex and costly system had to be installed, then managed, by an administrator. But today’s IVR functions on a virtual PBX or cloud PBX and is integrated into the system which is often a VoIP phone system. The main difference is that today’s systems are digital and no special physical equipment is required since all the technology resides in the cloud.

Modern iterations of IVR are much improved over earlier versions, further enhanced by the ability to use AI technology to understand human language, making it easy to automate simple requests. Customers can quickly fulfill their requirements without waiting to speak with a live agent. This in turn frees up live agents to focus their attention on customers with more complex issues. Ultimately this results in happier customers and better customer retention, helping you to grow your business.

Sign up for a 7-day free trial of LinkedPhone to see how easy it is to use our feature-rich IVR to start better serving your customers today!