Call Center Solutions Featured Article

While many companies are finding value in hosted call center technologies, there are few cloud-based call center necessities that can reap more benefits for a call center than a hosted interactive voice response (IVR) solution.

IVRs aren't what they used to be. Once they were blocky, premise-based boxes that did one thing: try (poorly) to route calls, and try not (usually unsuccessfully) to annoy callers. The latter was extremely difficult: early IVRs were rigid, hard to use and usually required a harassed IT worker to build a “tree” style menu that usually turned off more people than it helped. Changing the menu was a Herculean chore, which is why changes and updates were seldom made.

Of course, with the advent of hosted call center technologies, the IVR became a very different creature. Now an application that lies on a manager's desktop, the hosted IVR is easy to use, quick to alter according to need and a breeze to manage. They offer reporting and analysis and many other features that were just a dream two decades ago.

And, according to Daniel O’Sullivan, President and CEO of Interactive Digital - VUI Cloud, they save money. Lots of it.

“Though it varies by geographic region and length of call, agent handled call costs can run about $2.10 per call versus roughly 18 cents per call for the IVR,” wrote O'Sullivan in a recent blog post. “Doing the math for a premise based call center handling 5M calls per month and converting 1 percent of these calls from “satisfied by an agent” to “satisfied in the IVR” translates to $1.92 X 1% X 5M = $96,000 per month or $1,152,000/year.”

But these are just the cash benefits, says O'Sullivan. A hosted IVR solution can also provide the call center with improved IVR containment (AHR), better IVR utilization, reduced caller input error rates, reduced IVR handle time (AHT) and better call success rates. In addition, you'll provide callers with a better customer experience and improve your customer relationships overall.

What does this translate to? Not only a whole lot of saved money and aggravation for an organization, but a reminder that a hosted IVR solution is one of the most satisfying and quick-payback hosted call center technologies a company can implement.