Automatic Receptionist in Business – Enhance Positive Customer Experience
An Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system is one of the most frequently encountered tools in automated telephone customer service. We all recognize the velvety voice that offers us a choice of conversation topics and indicates which number to press. Soon, we’re connected to the appropriate consultant. Discover the benefits of using an automatic receptionist in your company in the second article of our new blog series on “Useful Features of a Virtual PBX.”
An automatic receptionist is designed to simplify life for both customers and customer service and call/contact center employees. However, customers often dislike automated voice menus. They perceive it as a barrier to contacting a consultant, rather than speeding up the process. So, how can you use automated voice announcements to enhance the positive customer experience of our company, rather than causing customers to hang up?
Ensure a Short Wait Time for Connecting With a Consultant
90% of calling customers prefer to speak with a person, not a machine. Therefore, the automatic receptionist in a company should assist in connecting with a consultant, not replace it.
Adjust the number of options on the list and the number of list levels to your company’s organizational structure, but remember that a too extensive voice menu will be tiresome for the customer and prolong the time to connect with a consultant. Therefore, do not exceed five options on the list and three levels of lists.
Choose an easy-to-configure virtual telephone exchange system. A clear, intuitive IVR system interface allows you to design a call tree using the “drag and drop” method. This also facilitates quality control of customer service, i.e., whether the automatic receptionist actually reduces the waiting time for connection. Check if the number of missed calls in the company is decreasing.
Appreciate Customer Autonomy
Thanks to the IVR voice menu, a customer can obtain necessary information quickly, without needing to connect with a consultant. Modern virtual exchanges facilitate analyzing customer behavior to understand the topics customers call about most frequently.
Once you know the problems customers want to solve, automate part of the communication and introduce self-service mechanisms. Through these, callers can independently obtain the information they need, such as the status of a shipment, account balance or issued invoice.
Many customers will appreciate being able to handle simple matters themselves. At the same time, this frees up the hotline, reserving contact with a consultant for more complex issues.
However, for self-service mechanisms to be effective, managing the IVR system should be based on systematic analysis of statistics and customer interactions. Get to know your customers and program the voice menu in such a way that you anticipate their expectations.
Be Available to Customers at Any Time
Modern customers do not want to be restricted by consultant working hours. They want to feel they can call the company exactly when they need information or assistance.
An automatic receptionist in a company will always answer a customer’s call, even when your consultants are unavailable. It will offer to record a message on voicemail, promise contact as soon as consultants return to work or ask the customer to leave information on when best to contact them.
Personalize Automatic Receptionist Messages
Today’s customers expect communication to be clearly tailored to their needs. Therefore, it is good to customize the type of announcement based on selected conditions, such as time of day, customer status (new vs. existing customer) or region (language versions).
More advanced IVR personalization mechanisms allow, for example identifying a customer by number or individual PIN. The consultant immediately has access to information about the customer and can use it to make the customer feel that the company truly cares about maintaining personalized communication.
How to Enable an Automatic Receptionist in Your Company?
Is it worth using an automatic receptionist in your company? Undoubtedly, it can be a way to increase customer satisfaction with service and enhance consumer loyalty to the brand. Therefore, choose an IVR announcement system that you can quickly implement and whose operation will be trouble-free for consultants. See how easily you can enable the automatic receptionist from EasyCall. The service is available in EasyCall business plans along with the Virtual PBX. Voice announcement configuration is available after logging into the interface of the PBX. Announcements can be prepared by a narrator or through speech synthesis, which occurs immediately after entering the text of the announcement, as described below.
The Voice Announcement element of the EasyCall VPBX allows for creating a message in the form of a voice announcement. We can create a message in three different ways:
- Upload a previously created message, e.g., recorded by a professional narrator. If we have a ready sound file (mp3, wav), we can load it into the element.
- Record a message from within the element using the voice recording option. We can create a voice announcement ourselves, lending our voice. A message recorded by a person with good diction and modulation will be well received by customers.
- Enter the text of the message. Using speech synthesis, the message will be converted into a voice message. We can choose male or female voices and a huge number of foreign languages (in the extended service package).
For each type of created announcement, there is an option to set the number of message repetitions. For example, if we set the value to 2, a person calling the company may wait until the welcome voice message is repeated twice. More information about useful features of the virtual PBX can be found in upcoming articles of the new series.
We invite you to get acquainted with our virtual PBX during a 14-day free trial without any obligations!