IVR phone systems

What is IVR?

IVR technology is essentially an automated voice system that interacts with your callers, gathers call-specific data, and uses information provided by your callers to route the phone call to the right department or person.

Contact centres and call centres—and even smaller businesses in general—use IVR systems to automatically route inbound calls, saving time for both agents and customers.

How do you set up an IVR in Dialpad?

IVR menus are sometimes called “phone trees” because each option can lead to further options (like the branches of a tree). It’s best to keep things as simple as possible, to avoid confusing or frustrating your callers.

Dialpad makes it easy to customize your IVR menu—you can design a call flow that best suits your business and your customers in minutes, right in your online dashboard. Think about the most common reasons why people call you. Look at data from previous interactions, identify FAQs, and program your IVR to provide the answers.

To do this:

1. Go to

   Admin Settings

   >

   Departments

2. Click

   Business Hours & Call Handling

   >

   Call Routing,

   then select

   Edit Call Routing

3. From there, you can choose to route calls to your agents, or alternatives like routing to voicemail, a prerecorded message, or an automated menu

Once that's done, you’ll have a fully automated contact centre IVR that can guide your callers!

More than an IVR system

Dialpad isn't just a business phone system. Here are just a few of the unified communications features you'll get:

Why our customers love Dialpad's IVR feature

It lets them provide a consistent customer experience

If your business gets a decent volume of inbound calls on a daily basis, then you probably need an IVR system. It lets your callers take care of basic questions themselves and route themselves to the right people, while minimizing the burden on your agents.

The result? Shorter wait times and lower overall call volume. Your callers feel they’re attended to faster, and your IVR system can deliver answers without a live agent ever getting involved.

It makes it easier for your customers to get answers outside business hours

The truth is that your customers will try to get in touch with your business on their own time and own schedule—and often, that's outside the usual 9 to 5 hours.

An IVR service can be turned on 24/7, even if you don't have agents on duty at all hours of the day (and night). Sure, the IVR can't answer every single complicated question and sometimes you'll still need a live agent to help, but you're still giving the callers who have more straightforward questions an avenue to get answers through.

With IVR, you can essentially automate huge chunks of the phone experience to make sure that anyone who calls your business is always sent to the right place to resolve their query, with minimal waiting or time spent on hold. (Thanks, callback options!)

That’s one of the biggest reasons why IVR is so important when it comes to improving the customer experience—IVR menus reduce the amount of effort your callers have to put in.

(It also helps that customers these days are used to calling a business and being greeted by IVR software and a list of menu options, not a human operator.)

This way, your business doesn’t need to list a different phone number for every department on your website—it can list just one VoIP number to receive every type of customer call… And still allow them to reach the specific person they need.

How much better would that make your customer experience on the phone?

It lets agents focus on high-value conversations

If your business has a high call volume, this one’s for you. Using IVR software can help you manage your call flow, which in turn allows your contact centre to handle a higher real-time call volume effectively.

The more people who call you, the harder it is for your agents to resolve everyone’s issues without being rushed into finding the “quick” answer rather than the right answer. Not great for customer satisfaction.

That’s why it’s so important to keep an eye on your call volume. Which, by the way, you can easily see with Dialpad's contact centre platform, along with your agents’ average speed to answer (basically, are you picking up the phone in a timely manner?):