We feature the best Interactive Voice Response services, to make it simple and easy to build phone menus to manage customer calls.
The best Interactive Voice Response services make it simple and easy to build phone menus to manage customer calls. Interactive Voice Response (IVR) services, are an integral part of most business phone systems and aim to provide a smooth caller experience by routing customer calls to the right person or department, and generally provide automated call assistance. They can be used to provide additional information, take payments, as part of a general on-hold messaging service to create an improved customer experience. A key advantage of Interactive Voice Response services is that they can handle large call volumes much more efficiently and cheaper than having human assistants at hand. They can also run from your existing phone service, preventing the need for upfront hardware costs. When used well, IVR’s can deliver a very cost-effective and time-saving way to connect customers with the service they need in a fully automated way. Additionally, with the popularity of cloud phone systems increasing, IVR options are now featured as standard, especially with larger platforms that offer a call center software experience or even Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS). On top of this, software-based Interactive Voice Response services can be used to collect analytics data so you can better gauge the performance of your phone system overall as well as your agents and other employees using it. This can allow a business to optimize the system to increase caller satisfaction and improve completion rates. So whether you’re using a VoIP service or a hardware solution, we’ll feature the best Interactive Voice Response services currently available. We’ve also featured the best Unified Communications as a Service. RingCentral Office is a cloud-based business phone system targeted at small business. It can include a multi-level IVR feature which includes auto-attendant features. As a cloud-based solution it means users aren’t limited to office phones but can instead use the RingCentral free apps to turn their smartphones and other mobile devices into softphones. If PBX phones and/or headsets are required, these can be supplied directly from RingCentral. The multi-level IVR feature provides an automated phone menu that can route customers to system extensions, voicemail, or even external phone numbers. It’s also flexible, and allows you to deploy different IVR menus for different office locations. There’s even an option to have a dedicated number for specific IVR menu which are independent from the main company number. IVR menus are set up and configured using a visual editor, and up to 250 different menus can be enabled at a time. The one caveat is that RingCentral Office has different service tiers. However, the multi-level auto attendant feature is only available from the Standard plan and up. Read our full RingCentral Office review. Five9 provide an industry-leading cloud contact center solution, which includes IVR as one of its many features. The software allows for intelligent inbound call routing as well as a variety of autodialer modes, and also caters for omnichannel communications via phone, video, social, email, or chat apps. There are also a wide range of CRM integrations available, not least for Salesforce, Oracle, Zendesk, and Netsuite. The IVR feature aims to provide an intuitive self-service using advanced voice recognition technology, to help improve the customer experience whilst freeing up agents to handle more complex queries.
