Creating an interactive voice response (IVR) can be as simple as telling your customer to press one or two and routing them to an operator at the end of the call. But to have an effective and confusion free IVR, it requires more thought and planning. However, this does not have to be a painful process; just outline what you want to do and what you want your customers to do to ensure that the IVR is an essential feature of your business communication structure. So, how do you get that? Read on to know more…

A good IVR is short and to the point

You don’t want unnecessary questions and prompts; think about the most crucial pieces of information that should be delivered to your customers and those that you need from them. So, think about the first five important questions or prompts you want to ask of or play for your customers, and begin there. And as time goes, you may want to remove or add some prompts to ensure you have the overall quality of the IVR.

Create an effective opening prompt

Not only should you be brief, it is also important that you are concise and polite. In fact, watch out for thirty second introductions or even too many multi-syllabic words in order to make sure you are grateful that the customer or employee is calling in to your IVR.

Have your system refer to itself as “I”

Customers don’t want to hear generic system; they prefer to hear a first person IVR.

Let your callers know what to expect from the system immediately

This is especially important for an IVR that has longer than four prompts. Customers want to see the end of the tunnel, so provide some glimpse of the time it will take or the number of questions needed to complete the IVR in your introduction.

Speech recognition answers

You may want to allow speech recognition answers, but it is important to make it clear what this answer needs to be. Also, don’t confuse your customers or the system; two or three syllable responses are enough.

Be concise

In order to be concise, consider using the same language to describe the same processes or nouns throughout the IVR. Break down the different actions and names and ensure that there is consistency throughout. Don’t tell your customers to enter ‘three’ at one place and to press ‘two’ in another, you will be confusing them. Also, if you call something a menu in one prompt, don’t refer to it as a message later on.

The barge factor

You have the option to allow barge-in or not. Barge-in is not important if a customer is in a noisy place because the noise may affect the voice recognition system. But if customers are in an office or at home, you can allow barge in to speed up the IVR.

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