When a customer calls a business, they often get their first impression of your business and customer service based on your IVR. While the desire for self-service increases, the importance of providing an efficient and positive experience is as relevant as ever.

Be Clear

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) prompts should be brief and easy to understand. Before publishing a flow, conduct usability testing to see if users can perform specific tasks, and that anything progressing through the menus is intuitive. After publishing, leverage call recordings to observe how your customers navigate the IVR and uncover areas for improvement.

Be Conversational

While text-to-speech prompts are available and can speed implementation, consider hiring voice talent to record prompts for a more articulate and compelling experience. Enabling automatic speech recognition lets customers more easily interact with your IVR in their language of choice, but voice bots are becoming commonplace and can create a far more conversational experience with far less effort.

Voicebots are not constrained to a fixed set of responses based on keywords. They leverage Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to interpret what a caller is saying, allowing your customer to talk freely rather than restricting them to a limited set of words or phrases. If you’re not yet taking advantage of NLU capabilities, watch this webinar to learn how to set up a bot in PureCloud.

Use the Right Prompts for the Right Customer

Incorporating dynamically referenced prompts enable you to target specific callers with specific messaging recorded in your corporate voice. The system sources customer data—phone number, zip code, device ID, booking reference—and uses the results to retrieve and play a specific prompt. With this approach, you’re able to create relevant and personable IVR experiences, using a consistent voice talent, for all types of customer scenarios.

For example, a customer calls into a travel customer service line. He’s prompted to key in his customer ID. Once he does so, the system can see that he has a booking. The flight destination on that booking is returned, which triggers the system to play a prerecorded destination prompt. The customer hears, “Thank you for calling. Is this about your flight to Dubai?”

As another example, imagine a customer wants to do some last-minute shopping on Christmas Eve. She’s wondering if a nearby store has extended opening hours, so she calls them. The system performs a data table lookup on the direct dial-in (DDI) to get the location and triggers a location-specific prompt to play. The caller hears, “Thank you for calling your local Raleigh store. For hours of operation, press 1….”

Learn more about designing flows in the PureCloud Architect tool by visiting the Resource Center.