Call Center Software - Start saving with IVR

IVR, also known as Interactive Voice Response, is on its way to being the future of telecommunications, and especially customer service. IVR is an advanced technological innovation which replaces a human agent with an “automated” one. IVR is a telephony technology in which one uses a touch-tone telephone to interact with a database to acquire information from or to enter data into the database. Basically, instead of calling up a company and speaking to a real live person, a customer can call up and speak to a machine and get virtually the same results. To the customer, there is barely any difference, but to the company there are many benefits. The amount of money that IVR technology can save a company is large enough to literally keep them in business.
“Instead of having 50 or 60 customer service representatives dealing with inbound calls, we are able to reduce that to 2 or 3 with our IVR system,” says Nathan Torres, Vice President of Technical Support at Freedom TeleWork, a Florida based telecommunications solutions company. “That reduces expenses to a fraction of what it was,” says Torres. In recent years, IVR has become increasingly popular among credit card companies, banks, and other many other companies, primarily set up to cut costs. It’s also being used to gather information and conduct telephone surveys in which the user is prompted to answer questions by pushing the numbers on a touch-tone telephone.
The results of IVR optimized calls are almost the same as those of live agents. “In many cases, the customers prefer to use IVR. They don’t like the wasted time of speaking to a person and having miscommunications and such things. With IVR, it’s that much easier to check your monthly bill and statement and get up-to-date account information than through a real life person,” says Mr. Torres.
“The feedback we get from companies is that IVR has increased productivity throughout the company as a whole and has reduced costs and improved overall profits and gains. IVR really is a key element in playing the role of shaping up and bettering the telecommunications industry. Within the next few years, only a handful of companies won’t be using IVR,” says Torres.
There are many other key innovative products that work with IVR such as: Voice Broadcasting, Predictive Dialing, Call Routing, Call Tracking, and others. These key components usually can be combined to create a Virtual Call Center or Hosted Call Center.

Call Center Services - Predictive Dialing

Amongst the vast amount of technological innovations that have sprung up in the recent number of years, Predictive Dialing is at the top of the list. Predictive Dialing is a key essential in the telemarketing and telecommunications field and has become in recent years a necessity rather than an extra. There are numerous reasons why this amazing novelty has changed the field.

Firstly, the Predictive Dialer detects the result of a call. For example: no answer, busy, fax, bad number, answering machine, all without any presence of human expertise. This results in saving time, by only transferring calls which are voice connects to the agents locally or remotely. This thereby increases efficiency for the company by having their highly-paid agent speak to potential customers, with wasting as little time as possible with “dead time.”

Possibly, the most noteworthy task done by the predictive dialer is to predict, which means always making an effort to get a live call to the available agent with the shortest amount of standby time. This is accomplished by self learning algorithms within the Predictive dialer to increase or decrease the dial ratio per agent.

Next is organization. Proper organization is essential for any company to succeed. With Predictive Dialing, the “no answer”, etc. clients are simply put on the bottom of the list, with an automatic note stating what exactly happened on the first try (answering machine, busy signal, etc…). Not only that, everything is computerized and in order, not just scribbled on a note somewhere bound to be lost or not entered into the system. Also, having an organized and neat workplace will make things easier and less overwhelming for the agent.

In addition to the added level of organization predictive dialing brings to the agent, it also helps the company as a whole. Meaning, each and every single tried customer, whether connected or not, has a record of everything that has taken place with each call on his tab. This therefore provides the company with key information and statistics that would otherwise be very hard to record. The predictive dialer can also delete and remove any unwanted numbers that will just waste time such as out-of-service numbers or fax numbers. The company can then look for new numbers to add to the list and minimize time wasted on bad numbers.

Perhaps the most important aspect of Predictive Dialing is the significant reduction in expenses. A predictive dialer results in major price decreases in telemarketing by having the agent busy 47 out of 60 minutes, as opposed to the traditional method, 16 out of 60 minutes. The design of the Predictive Dialer is to efficiently increase productivity, decrease expenses, and increase sales.

Submitted by: Freedom TeleWork