Did you know that many businesses don’t look into IVR monitoring until after they’ve suffered an outage? Whether it’s lack of knowledge or motivation, it’s crucial to have a system in place that can protect your call center against major risks that can affect your bottom line. IVR monitoring can ensure you have better uptime, better protection against outages, and a reliable call center that encourages customer retention.

Integrating IVR Monitoring After an Outage

It’s not uncommon to see businesses that look into IVR monitoring only after they’ve suffered an outage. In fact, in my experience, I’ve seen organizations that simply don’t bother to do any kind of monitoring on their phone systems, even customer-facing ones. Why? It may be that historically phones weren’t that important and that mentality has trickled down to today, or perhaps business owners don’t know a solution exists. The answer isn’t entirely known.

Yet, even after an outage, searching for what you need or understanding what services can protect your business can be complicated.

For example, we had a customer in the past that created a trial account. During our sales discussions, we were going over the service features and they said, “This all sounds exactly like what we were looking for. Where have you guys been? We’ve been searching for a service like this for years!” So, even if organizations are trying to find something to help prevent outages, they may not know where or how to look and might give up on the idea that such a solution exists.

Call Centers Need to Be More Proactive About Securing Their Networks/Uptime

In the past, phones used to be throwaway equipment. If you picked up the phone and heard a dial tone, that was good enough to indicate that it was working. But now, with IVRs becoming more customer facing and customer functional with features such as checking balancing, making payments, routing to agents for help, and more, downtime can cost serious money and make for very unhappy customers.

Depending on the size and function of the business, even short IVR downtimes can cost millions. It’s important to note that internal monitoring isn’t enough to know the customer experience, and manually calling the system or call center can be tedious. Therefore, in order for call centers to become more proactive about securing their networks and uptime, they need a solution that will detect issues before they occur and generate alerts so that you’re aware of existing problems.

Tools That Help Call Centers Ensure Better Uptime

Whether you’re aware of tools that can help ensure better uptime or not, at TelcoAlert, we provide a number of options to help companies better monitor their telephone systems such as:

• IVR monitoring. This service covers every aspect, from basic telecom checks such as “busy,” “no answer,” or “operator,” to fully navigating a customer’s IVR to ensure that self-service options work as expected 24/7. Whether you have telecom carrier issues (regional or nationwide), an IVR answering machine with an incorrect greeting, or a back-end web/database call failing to provide a customer with a balance or account information, IVR monitoring can handle a wide range of potential telecom outages.
• Call center agent monitoring, which will navigate your IVR system but also interact with your call center agents. This service helps monitor whether customers can even reach your agent queue, call center hold times, and whether agents are answering the phone.
• Fax system monitoring for businesses where fax communication is still critical.

Call Center Risks Associated With Not Implementing IVR Monitoring

Businesses that don’t think about implementing IVR monitoring run the risk of paying a high price. While it may be easy for telephony admins to gauge whether their phone systems are up, it’s another matter entirely to validate whether they are working as expected. Customers that call into an incorrectly functioning IVR can be met with confusing IVR prompts or error messages, DTMF navigation options that don’t work correctly, the inability to reach support agents, or payments/balance checks that fail. What’s more, typically, customers will not immediately report an issue they encounter which can lead to hours of downtime, costing companies million in business due to unreported issues.

Ready to Implement IVR Monitoring?

If you currently don’t have an IVR monitoring solution in place and you’d like to limit risks to your call center, consider IVR monitoring by TelcoAlert. With our solution, you can rest assured knowing that we’re monitoring your systems 24/7, making sure that they’re online at all times. We’ll alert you of issues before they even occur. Reach out to us if you’d like to learn more about how your business can benefit.