Creating an Effective IVR Auto Attendant for Your Business
Your IVR Auto Attendant is an extremely important part of your business. In many instances, this system is the first impression that you give a customer. Because of that, it’s essential that you know how to create an effective IVR on your VoIP system.
As you prepare to set up your IVR Auto Attendant, review the steps below:
Plan Out Your Prompts and Greeting
Before you set up your IVR Auto Attendant, it’s important to plan out how you want the system to communicate with your callers. By planning out your prompts and greeting, you’ll be less likely to make mistakes or leave off important information, and more likely to have an effective, customer-friendly system.
First, you’ll want to write out a greeting that all callers will hear. This greeting should include important information about your company, such as store hours or other contact information.
You’ll also want to decide on the most important departments or specific people within the office and add them to the list of prompts available to callers. This will ensure that your customers have clear, easy access to their needs.
Correctly Record Each Prompt and Greeting
Even the best planned prompts and greetings can be go awry if they are not recorded correctly. Poorly recorded or ordered prompts might confuse your customers, making it difficult for them to reach the person or department they need.
Because of this, you need to ensure that you're correctly recording each prompt and greeting. Not only should you make sure that you’re enunciating clearly and speaking slowly, but you also need to check to see that everything you’ve recorded makes sense, too. If it doesn’t, your customers won’t be able to successfully navigate your system.
Test Your System
Once you’ve planned out your IVR Auto Attendant and recorded all prompts and greetings, you need to test your system. After you have fully vetted the system, you should also enlist several others for testing purposes to make sure that everything can be easily understood by a calling customer.
By testing your system, you’ll have the chance to experience your system from a customer's perspective and eliminate confusion, redundancy, or simple errors.
These tips will help you create an effective IVR on your VoIP system. If you run into problems along the way, remember: the best way to ensure that the system is set up correctly is to plan. Before you program anything within the system itself, it is important to know exactly what you want to communicate, and how you want your customers to use that information.
An effective IVR Auto Attendant can do wonders for a business, so make sure you’re doing everything in your power to make it successful. If you have additional questions, you can always contact your VoIP service provider for support.
