How IVA/IVR Integration Can Significantly Reduce Call Center Costs

Running a contact center is a big deal. You have to be always on your heels to manage high operational costs and reduce handle times to make it profitable. Besides, you have to do everything that can meet customers’ ever-growing expectations for exceptional service. It is the only way to help your business survive in the market. It may feel like a constant uphill battle. Every decision you make should be balanced to improve efficiency without compromising the customer experience.

Tackling such challenges requires you to take steps in various ways, such as upgrading tools, integrating the latest technology into your existing systems, hiring new staff if needed, and much more. But what if only a single integration can solve your problems? IVA (intelligent virtual assistant) and IVR ( interactive voice response) integration can be the true game changer for contact centers. Such integration can blend the best automation with a human touch and provide an efficient, customer-friendly, cost-effective solution.

Let’s dig deeper to know what makes this IVR/IVA integration impactful for your contact center and how it helps you cut costs.

The Game-Changing Impact of IVA/IVR Integration in Your Contact Center Systems

Contact centers are constantly under enormous pressure to deliver fast, exceptional customer service to their customers. It comes with a fair number of challenges for them. The challenge is that contact centers look for ways to deliver quick and personalized customer support without breaking the bank. Integrating IVR/IVA into your call center can make it possible.

This powerful integration can automate your tasks, fulfill your business’s growing needs, reduce errors and onboarding and training costs, and do much more for your business. Let’s see how it can cut costs for your organization.

Scalability without Extra Expenses

As your call center expands, so should your capacity to manage the increasing call volumes. Scalability is not limited to increasing your staff numbers; it involves strategic technological enhancements to efficiently direct high call volumes to skilled agents. When call volumes increase unexpectedly due to a holiday rush, a product launch, or any other such situation, many call centers hire temporary agents or ask their existing staff to do overtime. It also drives up costs and leads to burnout.

However, with IVRs and IVAs, this situation can be met efficiently. Scalability can become the best part of your business. You don’t need additional staff to handle the large volume of calls. Instead, these intelligent systems can process thousands of interactions, whether it is related to guiding customers, updating account details, or answering routine questions.

Imagine this. The year’s busiest shopping season has started, and calls have flooded. Usually, this means hiring new staff in large numbers, increasing training hours, and dealing with the chaos of onboarding temporary agents. However, with an IVR/IVA integration, your contact center can meet the demand without compromising performance.

Reduces Errors

Humans can never be prone to making mistakes, especially when juggling multiple tasks under the pressure of limited time or quick delivery. This scenario is widespread in call centers, where agents must handle dozens of daily interactions. They may commonly make mistakes while attending a call, whether mishearing account details, accidentally applying the wrong charge, or misquoting a policy.

This is where the role of IVRs & IVAs comes in. These tools are designed to handle detail-oriented and repetitive tasks with much precision and thus avoid the risk of human error. There is no risk of getting distracted or tired due to heavy interactions or calls. Imagine another scene. Suppose a customer calls an agent to settle a billing issue on a busy day. The agent has taken many calls and is feeling a bit exhausted.

In such cases, he may make a mistake by applying a wrong adjustment that can lead to an undercharge or an overcharge. This may appear like a minor mistake, but it may have huge repercussions on your business, as such an error can result in costly escalations. Also, it may attract negative reviews from the customers and ultimately lose your customer’s trust.

IVR systems can be integrated into your CRM and helpdesk tools like Salesforce, Zoho, Freshdesk, Zendesk, etc, through CTI connectors. With this, agents get a unified view of customer interactions, which helps them understand the caller’s problems through pre-call information gathering. So, your support agents will be notified immediately whenever a customer calls you. If a caller makes a wrong selection or needs further assistance, the IVR offers options to repeat the menu or connect with the contact center agent.

Reduced Onboarding & Training Costs

Providing training to new agents is expensive in a call center. Onboarding agents requires many human resources, tools, and coaching to get them up to speed. Training of new hires means investment into more training sessions, resources, and more time. A new hire may need many weeks to grasp your products, scripts, and policies thoroughly. Now, let’s compare this situation with the implementation of IVA or IVR. Such deployments don’t need massive or multiple training sessions to perform to their fullest. Instead, these systems are already programmed for handling unlimited interaction without making any mistakes and in minutes.

IVRs or IVAs deliver consistent performance from day one once you implement them. It doesn’t matter whether your call center is getting call number 1 or number 20,000; it will provide the same efficiency and precision in every call. It is enormous when we look at the benefits that this implementation of IVR/IVAs can bring. It can cut down on your onboarding expenses. Integrating IVR into your system keeps your operations running smoothly. Besides, when these tools automate repetitive tasks, your agents get enough time to take on complex tasks and build meaningful customer relations.

Cutting down on Agent Workload

Implementing IVR systems allows your customers to help themselves. For example, imagine a customer calling your agent to check his account balance. Similarly, another customer may contact your agent to update his phone number. Such simple and routine tasks require the help of a live agent. However, your agent should, this time, solve complex issues. This is the situation when an IVR comes into action. It gives your customers the power and mechanism to help themselves. Whether your customer wants to check his credit score, reset a password, or track an order, he can get a guide through IVA and a step-by-step process to resolve these simple issues.

With these self-service options, repetitive and straightforward inquiries can be automated, which helps agents take a considerable load off their shoulders. Hence, it decreases workload and can help agents consume their energy on more complex high-value interactions such as upselling products, assisting in resolving technical challenges and resolving any dispute with a product company. It will improve agents’ productivity.

Implementing IVR/IVA in your system can save several hours and days for your company. When these systems redirect your customers to troubleshooting guides and other self-help options, it will save 15 to 20 minutes for your agents, which they often spend explaining the steps. In these saved times, your agents can take more other vital calls that will directly impact your call center’s efficiency and lead to lower staffing costs as you don’t need to hire extra staff to resolve such issues or make a balance between these.

No Overtime Costs & 24*7 Availability

Let’s face the actual scenario. Customer issues can’t wait for the 9 to 5 schedule to resolve. They may reach out to you anytime, even at midnight. Whether it’s about resetting a password or resolving a technical problem, any emergency may occur even at midnight; the customers will not wait for your business hours to resolve their issues.
Resolving your customers’ issues after business hours requires you to hire a new and additional team around the clock, which may be expensive for you. It may drain your resources as you may have to pay for after-hours work and the scheduling logistics.

When you implement IVR/IVA in your call center systems, it won’t clock out like human beings and provide 24*7 customer support, whether it is day, night, or midnight. It doesn’t matter if you need help at 3 AM. The IVA can guide you through troubleshooting, answer your FAQs, and provide account information without human interference.

For example, suppose you realized late at night that your flight booking has an issue or their package tracking system has some problem. In traditional, you may have to wait until morning shifts to get your problem resolved. This will undoubtedly frustrate a customer, and such situations may result in business loss. However, with the implementation of IVR/IVA, customers get immediate assistance to resolve their issues.

With this round-the-clock availability, you can get significant business savings and customer satisfaction savings. You don’t need to pay extra money to agents for overtime or hire additional staff. When satisfied, your customers will translate it into better reviews and loyalty, immensely benefiting your business in the long run.

Lower Average Handle Time

The average handle time helps your business understand how efficiently its support system functions. In general, a good average handle time is six minutes. But, achieving this number depends on your company’s approach to improving customer experience and the channels used to support customers.

In simple words, average handle time means the time agents spend on each interaction over the call. The longer your agents will spend on resolving customers’ issues on the call, the more it will cost your business. So, among several steps you can take to reduce AHT for your call center, implementing IVR/IVA can bring much better results for you.

The IVA/IVR gathers essential customer information just before the agent arrives. Further, when your agent picks up the call, he already knows who the customer is, what the issues are, and other relevant information. Hence, it slashes average handle time because agents don’t need to spend time collecting basic information about the customers and their problems. Every second saved in this process leads to significant cost savings for your company.

Wrapping Up

Overall, you can achieve extraordinary efficiency and deliver unmatched customer service through your contact center. IVR/IVA integration can make this process quick by empowering your customers with self-service options and helping your agents with quick customer information. It can streamline your call center processes and open the pathway to operational success. To unlock the benefits of IVR/IVA integration, you only have to contact NovelVox experts. With NovelVox’s integration team, you can seamlessly integrate this technology into your contact center systems.