GETTING LOTS OF INBOUND CALLS?
IVR system
Interactive Voice Response Systems (IVR systems) can route calls automatically and act as a 'round-the-clock solution for when your staff or contact centre agents aren’t available. Try it for free and get set up with a virtual business phone number in minutes!
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What is Interactive Voice Response (IVR)?
IVR technology is essentially an automated voice system that interacts with your callers, gathers call-specific data, and uses information provided by your callers to route the phone call to the right department or person.
Contact centres and call centres—and even smaller businesses in general—use IVR systems to automatically route inbound calls, saving time for both agents and customers.
💸 Interested in IVR system pricing?
Dialpad's pricing plans are cost-effective—and all Dialpad Connect plans come with auto attendant and IVR features!
What you get with Dialpad: The best IVR system and more
With Dialpad, you’ll get a state-of-the-art IVR system that answers every customer's call. But that’s not all. Here are some of the other unified communications features Dialpad offers:
Easy call routing
One of the most important things to look for in an IVR tool is something that's easy to use. Can you route calls to anyone in your company, change the pre-set rules on your own, and make sure callers are always sent to the right place—without having to contact a tech support team or wait for them to implement the changes? Dialpad lets you do exactly that.
All your communication channels in one place
With Dialpad, you can make phone calls, have video meetings, and send SMS/MMS + instant messages—all from the same beautiful desktop or mobile app. (It also works on web browsers, no downloads needed!)
Simple call forwarding
Set up a maximum of five call forwarding numbers so that any missed calls go straight to your colleague, mobile phone, or any other phone number. It takes just a few clicks from your online dashboard! Never miss a phone call again.
Integrations with tools you love
Dialpad integrates with all your favourite tools, including Salesforce, Zendesk, Google Workspace, HubSpot, Microsoft Teams and more. Need a custom integration? You can build your own with Dialpad’s open API and webhooks.
Robust analytics
Dialpad's platform incorporates a robust suite of analytics, providing business leaders with powerful tools to transform raw call data into strategic insights. Reporting features and filters are built with contact center and sales needs in mind, delivering deeper visibility into both agent performance and the customer journey, helping you manage operations with unparalleled precision. Key features include:
Unified live dashboard
Agent productivity
Advanced talk time metrics
Granular call abandonment insights
Queue health report
Callback effectiveness report
Customizable & auto-saving reports
Speaks your callers’ language
If you have customers with different language preferences, you’ll need an IVR application that can accommodate them. Dialpad’s IVR supports a range of languages, including English (British, US, and Australian), Japanese, French, Spanish, Chinese, Italian and more. You can customise the language for individual call centres, departments or even users.
Why our customers love Dialpad's IVR feature
It lets them provide a consistent customer experience
If your business gets a decent volume of inbound calls on a daily basis, then you probably need an IVR system. It lets your callers take care of basic questions themselves and route themselves to the right people, while minimising the burden on your agents.
The result? Shorter wait times and lower overall call volume. Your callers feel they’re attended to faster, and your IVR system can deliver answers without a live agent ever getting involved.
It makes it easier for your customers to get answers outside business hours
The truth is that your customers will try to get in touch with your business on their own time and own schedule—and often, that's outside the usual 9 to 5 hours.
An IVR service can be turned on 24/7, even if you don't have agents on duty at all hours of the day (and night). Sure, the IVR can't answer every single complicated question and sometimes you'll still need a live agent to help, but you're still giving the callers who have more straightforward questions an avenue to get answers through.
With IVR, you can essentially automate huge chunks of the phone experience to make sure that anyone who calls your business is always sent to the right place to resolve their query, with minimal waiting or time spent on hold. (Thanks, callback options!)
That’s one of the biggest reasons why IVR is so important when it comes to improving the customer experience—IVR menus reduce the amount of effort your callers have to put in.
(It also helps that customers these days are used to calling a business and being greeted by IVR software and a list of menu options, not a human operator.)
This way, your business doesn’t need to list a different phone number for every department on your website—it can list just one VoIP number to receive every type of customer call… And still allow them to reach the specific person they need.
How much better would that make your customer experience on the phone?
It lets agents focus on high-value conversations
If your business has a high call volume, this one’s for you. Using IVR software can help you manage your call flow, which in turn allows your contact centre to handle a higher real-time call volume effectively.
The more people who call you, the harder it is for your agents to resolve everyone’s issues without being rushed into finding the “quick” answer rather than the right answer. Not great for customer satisfaction.
That’s why it’s so important to keep an eye on your call volume. Which, by the way, you can easily see with Dialpad’s contact centre platform, along with your agents’ average speed to answer (basically, are you picking up the phone in a timely manner?):
The best IVR system is built right in
Why pay for (and manage) a separate IVR software when it could be built into your phone system or contact centre platform? See how easy it is to set up in Dialpad by booking a demo, or take a self-guided interactive tour of the app on your own!
FAQs about IVR systems
Every IVR service provider's pricing is different, and can range pretty widely. Generally, the most cost-effective way to give your team access to IVR technology is by choosing a business phone system, communications platform, or contact centre software that has IVR built in.
These providers are typically SaaS providers, and will charge on a monthly or annual subscription model, which means your upfront costs are drastically reduced.
For example, Dialpad's pricing plans are available in a few tiers, and all of them come with an IVR system included—in addition to other features like unlimited calling in the US and Canada, custom voicemail greetings, off-hours routing, and more.
The Enterprise plan even comes with a 100% uptime guarantee.
Just as a rule of thumb, before you make a decision about which IVR platform to choose, look at two things: customer support (do you have to pay extra for it?) and what features are included in each pricing tier. This is where most IVR service providers will charge you extra for basic things if you're not careful.
Years ago, you would've needed a ton of expensive equipment to run an interactive voice response system—dedicated software on a separate computer, a database, a couple of servers, not to mention an IT team to install and look after everything.
But today, IVR is built right into some cloud-based communications platforms. (Like Dialpad!) It’s easy to set up and configure, and all the infrastructure is owned and maintained by your vendor, so it costs you less too.
How it works: When you get an inbound call, the IVR system springs into action and greets the caller with a pre-recorded welcome message and a list of options, which you’ve pre-programmed to fit your business' needs.
More advanced systems use speech recognition technology and will ask the caller to give a brief description of their reason for calling (e.g. “I need to change my password” or “I want to pay a bill”). These systems use AI to understand the words spoken by the caller.
Other systems will ask the caller to press a button on their phone’s keypad (“#1 for accounts, #2 for tech support,” and so on). They can detect the dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) tones from a phone’s keypad, and use the information to process the request.
When the system detects a simple inquiry, it may provide self-service options, or route the call to the right person or department as defined by your pre-set call routing rules. This may be based on availability skill set, or on a rotational basis.
If a caller wants to speak to someone who’s not picking up, the IVR menu can offer alternative options such as trying a different department or leaving a voicemail. (Dialpad’s IVR system can handle callers’ requests in both of these ways to make sure they get the right information as efficiently as possible.)
If your business isn’t already using an IVR solution, here are a few examples of how you can use it. There's contact centre routing—when your customers try to get in touch with you, the last thing you want is for your contact centre or call centre team to put you through to the wrong advisor. That’s where call routing comes in. In the specific case of contact centre routing, IVR makes sure all inbound calls are routed to the right agent, which keeps the average duration of calls low, since the vast majority of callers will be putting themselves in touch with the people who can resolve their issue quickly.
Being able to allow your callers route calls and do that heavy lifting for you also comes with an added bonus: It keeps your contact centre queues shorter, which creates a better customer experience overall.
IVR is also a fantastic way to get callers to provide feedback or answer short surveys. You can set up your IVR system to ask callers to answer a quick survey at some point during the call (ideally at the end—right in the middle tends to interrupt conversations). They’re a great tool for measuring customer satisfaction. For example, you can set up a CSAT (customer satisfaction) survey in Dialpad in just a few clicks, and Dialpad’s text-to-speech feature will automatically ask that question in your customer calls.
Finally, there's general office call routing, which is subtly different from contact centre routing, since most office calls will be going through to coworkers, receptionists, or other members of the office rather than a live agent in a call centre. Think of these calls as the types of phone calls you get at your HQ, rather than the ones that go to your customer support team in an inbound contact centre. You may still have someone at reception to greet visitors and pick up the phone when it does ring, but you can at least minimise those kinds of repetitive desk phone tasks with an IVR system that can take care of most of the call routing work. Long story short: Good IVR applications turn call routing into a self-service—and cut out the need to hire an operator or dedicated virtual receptionist.
Definitely. One industry-specific example for IVR is with bank and stock account transactions. These days, it’s pretty easy to check your account balances from your mobile device or computer. It’s just kind of how that customer experience has naturally progressed. An IVR system doesn’t make you recite your account number (or any other sensitive information, for that matter) to an actual person, and generally it’s pretty efficient since it’s all automated. Where human operatives might have call recording functionalities enabled automatically for all the calls they take, IVR systems don’t work this way.