How to Make Contact Center IVR Data Work for You

We know that as a contact center these days, you practically need to set up an IVR. However, have you given thought to how to set one up properly? Or better yet, how to look into IVR analytics to help improve both your IVR and your customer experience? 

 

What is IVR?

IVR stands for Interactive Voice Response. If you’ve made a call to a company for any sort of service, appointment or question, you’ve probably come across one by now. It’s the computerized system that enables either a dial pad or a voice-responsive method, assisting to route a call to the appropriate party. An IVR helps your organization’s efficiency, offering a cost-effective staffing supplement to direct your incoming calls accordingly.

 

So what is IVR data analytics?

To make it easy for starters, IVR data analytics is the use of data collected from your IVR system and experiences to offer you a picture into its actual effectiveness. It’s an end-to-end call assessment that is crucial for you to incorporate into your strategy.

IVR analytics gives you visibility to the way your IVR bridges your customers to your contact centers. When used correctly, it will use your data to showcase why and where your customers run into roadblocks. This tool can identify the reasoning behind call drop off and even customer service dissatisfaction.

 

What can I learn from IVR data analytics?

There are several metrics and insights you can learn from your IVR data analytics. When you start to look into how your IVR is performing, you can start maximizing efficiencies in several areas. Your IVR data analytics can offer valuable nuggets such as:

• Percentage of customers opted out during the IVR
• The specific prompts most customers opted to speak to an agent instead
• Why certain calls may be transferred to other departments
• Misrouting of customers to wrong queues 
• Handling of calls solely by the IVR
• Types and qualities of call handled by IVR versus agent

After learning from these types of IVR data analytics, you’ll gain a good idea on how to optimize IVR flows, identify bottlenecks and reduce customer effort to improve your overall customer experience.

 

How does IVR play into customer experience?

IVR data analytics can tell you two major things about your customer’s experience specifically: the trend of their general issues and whether your IVR is helping or hurting you. 

Are you noticing in your IVR data that there’s a larger percentage of your customer base gravitating toward a certain service they need assistance with? This will be a critical method for you to pinpoint an area of your organization that may need some attention. It may be as simple as updating your FAQ page, or bugs that need to be addressed in your product.

Also, it won’t be hard to determine if your IVR script is giving you your money’s worth. Peek at your drop offs and where they’re coming from and you should be able to easily determine if something isn’t working for your customers. Are your scripts too long or confusing? Does it take people in circles that’s causing customer frustration? Try calling in and going through the process yourself if needed and make shifts from there to bring value back to your customer experience journey.

 

So how do I improve my IVR?

Naturally, you need to start by actually looking at your IVR data. Start with instituting a quarterly, or even monthly (if needed), session where you pull and review the data. 

If you already have an IVR instated, you likely have the capability to extract data your IVR platform has been collecting. Visualizing and analyzing the data will often tell you what you need to know. Dedicate an analyst to work on this, or look into a data visualization tool to help you sift through the peaks and valleys of your customer experience trends. 

Make sure the overall map of your IVR scripts makes sense. The biggest frustration for customers with an IVR are automated messages being too long, not taking them to where they need to go or not giving easy enough access to a live agent. Take a moment to address these and you’ll be on your way to optimizing your customer experience.

 

Platforms that can help

According to Genesys, while 53% of contact centers believe analytics will be what reshapes the industry in upcoming years, 40% of all centers are still lacking data analytics tools. 

You can utilize certain types of platforms or technologies to help you gain data visualization. From there, you can start analyzing and adding amendments to your strategy to maximize your IVR and overall customer experience efforts. 

Take Aceyus, for example.

The technology we offer can be exactly what you need: data reporting, data organization and data visualization. Tools like this can be customized to offer you the real-time data reporting and visualization you need to get your IVR analytics into shape. 

 

Don’t ignore the data you have at your fingertips. You could be on the cusp of maximizing your customer experience potential. 

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Need help with collecting and visualizing your IVR data analytics? Contact Aceyus today for a free solutions consultation. 

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