How Does IVR Monitoring and Testing Help IT Teams?

Automated IVR testing and monitoring gives IT professionals real-time status alerts, which enables faster troubleshooting and response times, leading to less downtime overall.

It also proactively contributes to greater reliability through load testing. This step can be incredibly important when a surge in call volume is expected, especially for industries like finance or healthcare which are subject to strict regulatory requirements.

IVR monitoring also provides smarter recording and response features that can be used to enhance customer service, improve contact center operations, meet compliance requirements, and generate valuable data.

Making the Business Case for IVR Monitoring: Benefits & Use Cases

Although IVR monitoring tools and services enable IT teams to work much more efficiently and effectively, procurement departments or other stakeholders may need help understanding the benefits of investing in an IVR maintenance and optimization tool when there is already an in-house IT department. 

In these cases, all parties should consider how the performance of a call center has ripple effects on the entire organization. When there is less time spent on reactive maintenance, there is more time to spend on optimization.

Benefits of IVR Optimization

Improving Customer Service Standards

If the IVR isn’t working, customer calls go unanswered. This sets up a stumbling block to establishing an omnichannel environment that provides on-demand services, as today’s customers have come to expect.

Preventing Customers from Jumping Ship

When a customer can’t get a question answered from one company, the usual response is to proceed to that company’s competitors and get answers there. Suddenly call loss escalates to potential business loss, which means profit loss. IVR monitoring helps prevent this by shedding light on the questions that customers need answered.

Improving Current Operations

Your IVR system may be running, but that doesn’t mean it’s running as well as it could be. Monitoring your system can improve operations and prevent revenue loss.

Load Testing

Even though there is a natural ebb and flow to customer contact, excessive stress is a very real possibility for many IVRs. Proper load/stress testing will help you determine how your IVR handles calls during peak times, so you can enter key time periods with full confidence that you’re ready to handle any surge.

Cost Savings

What happens when the IVR is overly stressed and routing calls elsewhere? If it’s routing calls back to agents, you could be paying agents to solve the simplest problems. You want those trained professionals to be solving serious problems. Proper monitoring can ensure your resources are allocated in a cost-effective way.

Features & Use Cases for IVR Monitoring

Conduct a Survey

Check in with your customers after you begin using IVR to handle their calls. Find out what their perception was of its efficiency, effectiveness, and whether they’ll use this method to contact your company again. Be proactive about communicating with customers about the survey results. If you receive some negative feedback, address the concerns and let customers know you will be using the results to improve their experience with your contact center.

Create a Clear Menu

Make sure customers are offered their options in clear language that’s presented consistently. For instance, determine whether you’ll use a phrase that includes a verb, such as “To make a payment, press one. To speak to someone in sales, press two,” versus using a simple badge-style designation, such as “For Billing, press one. For sales, press two.”

Streamline Call Paths

Test your system extensively to see where customers will end up, and how many buttons it requires to get there. Make sure someone wanting to make a payment through your IVR isn’t working through four or five different menus to arrive at accounts receivable.

Present the Most Commonly Chosen Option First

If 75% of your calls are for placing orders, then make sure “to place an order” is assigned to “press one.” This seems simple, but because it will impact your metrics for call-resolution time, you’ll want to ensure callers quickly arrive at their destination.

Intelligently Allow Callers Access to Agents

Your IVR should always improve the customer experience by giving callers a parachute. As you get further into the interaction, you might have a prompt for them to choose to speak to a representative. Don’t worry that this will eliminate the need for your IVR because if your IVR is effective, they’ll generally prefer to stick with the automated system.

Do You Need to Stress Test? Understanding the Pros & Cons of IVR Load Testing

It is helpful for even experienced call center and IVR professionals to revisit the subject of IVR load testing to understand how it can – and can’t – be leveraged to optimize operations.

IVR load testing is the process of testing an IVR system and its accompanying infrastructure by sending a large volume of traffic through it to see how much of that traffic the system can handle. IVR load testing is designed to measure the overall environment during various levels of usage. It’s not specifically out to break the system, but it can tell when the system approaches breakdown by monitoring the system while it’s testing, checking for things like CPU use, memory consumption, and similar system measurements to ensure a better outcome. 

Load testing is most valuable when the IVR meets the following criteria:

How Does IVR Monitoring
Impact Different Industries?

There are several industry-agnostic benefits associated with monitoring and improved IVR outcomes. For example:

• Automatic outage alerts help businesses of all types and sizes serve their customers more effectively around the clock. 
• Monitoring helps enrich companies’ understanding of the end user, generating valuable information about customer behavior and preferences with every call interaction (including responses to surveys and polls). 
• The automated nature of the system frees up employees to perform more complex tasks, and helps promote improved employee retention by eliminating some of the routine calls that can make a position boring and mundane.

However, it’s important to also consider the value of IVR monitoring within sector-specific settings. From healthcare to retail sales and public services, IVR monitoring both gathers and distributes information, enriching the end-user experience and equipping the organization’s leaders with the insight they need to further improve policies and practices.

Healthcare: IVR monitoring promotes better outcomes as patients are able to log data into an automated system and their physicians are able to quickly identify those patients who are in need of additional care or who are not compliant with their instructions for care.

IVR monitoring also frees up critical time for physicians, therapists, and nurses, because patients can access and provide much of their information through the automated system. While they may want to provide opportunities for patients to ask questions or get more information, there is the option to exchange information quickly through IVR monitoring.

Retail: From checking the status of an order to paying an invoice through the system, IVR monitoring streamlines the customer service experience from the perspective of both the customer and the retailer. Customers are able to access accurate, fast information, and the retailer is able to free up agents to work on more complex customer service issues.

IVR monitoring also provides a convenient way to gather data through customer satisfaction surveys. It’s inexpensive and easy for the company to execute, and customers offering responses are more likely to give an honest answer when a company agent is not present on the other end of the line.

Banks and Finance: Consumers’ expectation of 24/7 service and accessibility isn’t limited only to shopping and entertainment; they expect to have access to information related to their bank accounts and finances. IVR monitoring allows bank customers to get balance information or initiate payments.

In addition, IVR monitoring ensures that when there’s any kind of threat to bank security through your communications tools, you’ll receive real-time alerts from your provider.

Government and Public Service: Your community members want to be able to access your offices with the same ease and flexibility they expect from online merchants. It’s no longer acceptable to organize your policies around an expectation that your residents will come, in person, to stand in a long line to file a paper form.

Instead, IVR monitoring allows you to engage your residents with automated surveys and requests for volunteers. You can make it easy for them to pay their taxes or parking ticket, order public transport services, or pay utility bills.

Where is IVR Technology Going Next?

Over the years, the core concepts of IVR success and optimization have revolved around two prevailing goals:

While these underlying principles remain the same, the technology available to achieve them is constantly progressing, all while customer expectations continuously evolve. It’s important to continually refine your IVR practices to remove friction and reduce contact effort according to your customer’s changing needs and preferences. 

To this end, understanding what’s ahead for IVR technology can help you put into place future-friendly monitoring and testing services that can help you stay agile and responsive at a real-world business pace. There are several great things ahead:

IVR benefits will vary between organizations and how they apply the available features, but an optimized IVR system has advantages for any business that desires improved customer service.