What if you never had to answer the phones again?

Trick question. Of course, you’ll have to answer your phone at some point. But when you use an IVR—an interactive voice response system—you’ll only have to pick up the phone when someone’s already up for a chat.

IVR software can collect information on callers, screen out unwanted callers, and give your business a professional presence 24 hours a day. With an IVR application in place, your business can gather information while you sleep. Your IVR can field incoming calls from prospective clients while you block out time at work. For all intents and purposes, you’ll only have to answer the phone when you want to.

If that sounds like something that might remake the way you do business, let’s dig further into the IVR.

What is IVR—Interactive Voice Response?

If you’ve ever called a phone system or a call center and interacted with an automated message, you’ve encountered an IVR system.

The role of IVR is to route your call to the right place without the input of an actual human party on the receiver’s end. Ideally, that means your caller will be able to choose from the options easily and navigate straight to the appropriate team member.

If you’ve ever heard something like “to speak with a representative, press 1,” then you’ve dealt with an IVR. But if you’ve never been on the other side of an IVR before, you might not know just how helpful they can be in managing your business and managing call volume.

How IVR Works

IVR systems work with a combination of speech recognition and touch-tone keypad selection to automate call routing. IVR does this by providing prerecorded voice responses based on user input, keypad signal logic, access to relevant data, and sometimes, recording voice input for future use. IVR systems may also use computer telephony integration (CTI) to hand off a call to a live agent who can view the data related to a caller.

IVR systems use dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) signals to interpret keypad input and communicate between phone and computer. This allows IVR software to provide users prerecorded greetings or menu options specified by an organization. Advanced IVR platforms include voice recognition software, leveraging natural language processing (NLP) for a conversational self-service experience.

IVR may also leverage text-to-speech (TTS) technology to communicate complex information, such as news reports, emails, weather, etc.

What Are the Benefits of Using an IVR?

Don’t think that using an IVR will make your business sound like one of those giant corporate conglomerates that keep people on hold as a matter of principle. Instead, an IVR for a small or mid-sized business can work wonders to improve your relationships with customers:

• Consistent professionalism. With pre-recorded messages, you’ll essentially have a courteous professional answering the phone for you 24 hours a day thereby improving customer experience. Robots don’t need to take holidays off and they don’t ever ask for a raise. They’ll use pre-recorded messages to consistently use the tone you want without fail.
• Filtering. Filtering helps the customer save time. Rather than a company tossing out calls, they’ll be able to direct them more quickly to the proper person.
• Personalization. Don’t think that automating a process like answering phones automatically means your business will become like a faceless corporation. You can add custom numbers to your directory to fashion specific responses for favorite clients and contacts. An intelligent IVR can even wish someone a happy birthday if you have that information handy.
• Customer satisfaction. According to statistics from eConsultancy, consumers prefer phone over email, live chat, and an online knowledgebase when they have a question they need to be answered in real-time.
• Information. When you answer your own phone calls, you become your own information-gatherer. It adds to the length and heft required to get through a phone conversation. An IVR can pre-screen calls and gain this information before you ever pick up the phone. This will give you insights into customers who are calling you up, what their problem might be, and what you can do about it. This saves you time and makes the phone call much more rewarding for the customer.
• IVRs allow self-service. Sure, people dial through IVRs to get through to humans all the time. But what if someone is just checking up on their account balance? What if they only need to hear your business hours? There’s no reason that they should have to take up the time of one of your employees when an IVR can handle simple requests automatically.
• Speeding up wait times. If you have a large phone presence and a limited amount of salespeople, then keeping someone on hold is risky. An IVR can put the most recent calls at the head of the caller queue, minimizing their wait time. Depending on your available resources, this system won’t always be perfect, but the IVR can optimize it in a way that benefits both you and the customer.
• Cost savings. Leveraging IVR technology as an automatic call distributor (ACD) saves you the cost of hiring a live agent to field inbound calls.

With benefits like these, the obvious answer is to move to an IVR solution and never look back. But not every business uses an IVR. They believe it’s too complicated to set up or will end up being too expensive.

But what if you configure an IVR system using Grasshopper’s voice system infrastructure to have your own version of a contact center?

How to Configure an IVR with Grasshopper

Once you log in to your Grasshopper account, there are plenty of options for setting up an Interactive Voice Response system:

• Create your settings. If you have multiple employees/teams, you’ll want to create a set of extensions. Even if you’re simply connecting remote team member cell phone numbers, you can use the custom voice greeting steer people in the right direction with an extension system.
• Set up a main greeting. Your main greeting is the voice greeting you use to greet people as soon as they dial to your main business number. You can edit and record your own, or have one of our voice professionals record it for you.
• Edit your timing. Depending on the time of day, you can have different options with the main menu. For example, all calls can forward to your cell phone during the day. But after 5 p.m., you can use the voice system to direct customers elsewhere or have them leave a voicemail.
• Create team extensions. For example, you might create an extension for “Sales.” Under this extension, you can use multiple employees and choose your options for how calls are forwarded when someone chooses “Sales.” You can even use the settings to speed up customer response by having multiple lines ring when an extension is dialed, giving the call to the first to pick up.

If it sounds complicated, don’t worry—we’re unrolling a new tutorial feature that will hold your hand throughout the process so you can set up your own IVR call flows without having to figure everything out yourself.

That’s it. Using an IVR with your own designed extensions and hours, you can completely customize the way you interact with your customers. This will not only free up your time but make your company more responsive.