Although traditional IVR is still useful for specific purposes, such as numeric data entry or simple information retrieval, its inability to understand sentiment and rigid keypad controls cause an unsatisfactory experience for 61% of users and make it a no-go for most call-reliant companies. Instead, they opt for conversational IVR, an AI-powered alternative that uses NLP to understand and interpret callers’ speech, providing spot-on replies based on context, not just a single prompt.
Aside from personalising calls, conversational IVR also helps you reduce the call abandonment rate. A properly configured system identifies frustrated callers and connects them with human agents, who, in their turn, can satisfy queries beyond the machine’s capabilities and minimise wasted opportunities.
Keep reading to explore conversational IVR and how you can use it to amplify and streamline your caller journeys.
Built with AI, conversational IVR is an automated phone system that creates voice-controlled caller journeys to help consumers get information or interact with your brand through natural, back-and-forth dialogues.
Conversational IVR is most often applied to inbound calls, and for a good reason. It helps companies with large inbound volumes reduce the load on their agents, ensuring they can maintain high conversion rates even during extreme traffic spikes.
Here’s how, for example, solar installation companies can deploy conversational IVR:
As for the outbound calls, IVR helps brands pre-qualify leads, manage appointments, and conduct surveys.
Once a caller speaks, artificial intelligence activates:
For maximum accuracy, a system also references historical records, commonly sourced from CRM or lead management systems.
Conversational IVR needs mere seconds to scan your databases and provide the caller with the right information, all automatically. Next, based on the context and sentiment, the system decides whether to:
Thanks to machine learning, conversational IVR adapts not just to the current context but also to the caller’s attributes and your performance data, shaping decision logic based on the mix of the three.
Throughout the conversation, IVR gathers information about the caller and outlines qualifying attributes. For example, if a person says they need to mount solar panels on their home’s roof, they’re recorded as a residential lead.
All qualification data is instantly transferred to CRM or LMS databases, enabling human agents to follow up on prospects from the right place and avoid repeating questions.
Conversational IVR is far ahead of the traditional system in many ways. It has more natural and convenient controls, handles more queries, and personalises caller journeys – a feature expected by 67% of customers.
Source: PwC
Although traditional IVR can lower satisfaction rates and even repel clients when used as a blanket solution, it can have opposite effects with a more thoughtful, selective approach.
Traditional IVR performs great in these use cases:
Phonexa’s IVR encompasses these core functions and more, allowing you to route your callers along efficient journeys, featuring custom scripts, recordings, and voice recognition.
Book a demo and learn how Phonexa’s IVR can amplify your call campaigns.
| Call centre load reduction | Conversational IVR handles the majority of call traffic, allowing you to scale and helping your agents to focus on the most important prospects. |
| Enhanced lead qualification | By acting on data gathered by conversational IVR, your marketing and sales experts are more likely to meet potential clients where they are and bring them to conversion. |
| Continuous improvement | Thanks to machine learning, your IVR is in a constant state of refinement, improving its caller journey with each processed call. |
| Reduced costs | Handling a significant volume of calls, IVR reduces the need for a large agent team. |
| Consistency and legal safety | Since it follows pre-written scripts, mindfully configured conversational IVR doesn’t leave room for human error and ensures regulatory compliance. |
| Customisable functionality | Conversational IVR is highly flexible and supports third-party integrations, which allows you to align the system with your frameworks and business goals. |
To ensure that your conversational IVR purchase and configuration are effective and efficient, you must define your business goals, such as:
Now, you need to surface the most common caller questions, which will, in fact, serve as pivot points when building caller journeys.
Separate questions in the following groups:
The easiest way to extract questions from inbound and outbound calls is to use transcription or call-recording software, such as Phonexa’s CloudPBX.
Book a demo to learn more about Phonexa.
When deciding, ensure the following factors are in line with your goals and expectations:
Conversational IVR onboarding consists of 3 steps:
| Installation and integration | Install conversational IVR in your system and integrate it with your CRMs, CDPs, fraud-prevention solutions, and payment systems to enable automatic data exchange and streamline your processes. |
| Colleague training | Provide courses or organise collaborative training to ensure your colleagues can master IVR as quickly as possible. |
| Testing and issue resolution | Audit all caller journeys, simulate high call volumes, and regularly monitor for issues to identify and fix potential malfunctions. |
Although conversation IVR tailors customer journeys to context and intent, it does this based on the pre-defined conversation flow – the one you map when configuring the system.
Here’s the framework that will help you along the way:
Professional tip: Use open-ended questions, such as “What’s the problem you’re facing?” or “How can I help you?”, to ensure the IVR stays within the right context and replies accurately.
As importantly, you may want to incorporate “escape hatches” – algorithms that connect a caller to a human agent whenever the system can’t understand the query.
The easiest and quickest way to give your conversational IVR a voice is to use the service provider’s ready-made samples. That said, it isn’t always the best choice. If you strive to build a unique brand image, you need a stand-out voice, which you can acquire either through in-house or professional recording.
To align your pre-recorded phrases with an AI-generated voice, you may want to upload recordings to Professional Voice Cloning (PVC) services, such as ElevenLabs. It creates a so-called neural voice that you can apply to conversational IVR software.
You can measure the performance of your conversational IVR by tracking key performance indicators – including call abandonment rate, conversion rate, first-contact resolution, and intent-recognition accuracy – and by replaying call recordings.
Once areas for improvement are identified, you can work them out using, say, a popular A/B testing method:
Pro tip: Store and analyse information acquired through A/B testing. It may help you amplify your other marketing and even sales efforts by, for example, surfacing the most common objections.
As for lead generation, conversational IVR is great for pay-per-call campaigns.
Conversational IVR steps in at the right time when potential customers call, automatically running conversations to qualify users based on attributes or call length.
In this process, conversational IVR is typically operated by advertisers or affiliate networks, which also require call-tracking solutions to manage and accurately attribute callers. For that purpose, many specialists prefer Call Logic, Phonexa’s core solution, designed for call management:
Chances are, your business can perform better by securing not only IVR-powered calls but also web leads from targeted channels. And then, when both traffic pipelines deliver considerable results, you can use Phonexa’s software to manage callers and web leads – all in one place.
At its core, Phonexa has LMS Sync for informed lead management and distribution, and Call Logic for granular call tracking, routing, IVR, and pay-per-call campaigns.
Integrated with our add-ons, Phonexa’s core solutions enable automatic data exchange for seamless, time-efficient accounting, click tracking, and, most importantly, fraud prevention. Not only does our software analyse historical, geographic, and blocklist data to flag and decline fake leads/calls, but it also screens prospects against the litigator databases to filter out non-consensual traffic.
Designed to align with diverse business models, Phonexa’s modules are fully adjustable. By creating unique workflows for internal and external operations and selecting data for your reports, you tailor the system to your specific needs, building a foundation for scaling and continuous ROI growth.
“We have eight products in one, and there is really no other platform out there for affiliate marketers and advertisers that has the robust capabilities in terms of the product suite that we offer up front. Not only can you do call tracking and distribution, but you can do lead tracking and distribution as well as traffic-based tracking across all your offers. It doesn’t matter how you’re working with other entities, you can track essentially any kind of customer interaction in our platform and be able to have closed-loop reporting on that interaction, especially when there are multiple entities involved.” – Talar Malakian, from Revolutionising B2B Marketing podcast
Here’s how Phonexa helped its client specialising in lead generation:
Here are two core Phonexa products you get at a single price:
| LMS Sync | Lead tracking & distribution software |
| Call Logic | Call tracking & distribution software |
Here are the six add-ons you get as a Phonexa client:
Book a demo to see how Phonexa can amplify your call and lead management.
IVR is a telephony system that allows callers to interact with brands or retrieve information by navigating through keypad-controlled decision trees. Conversational IVR, in turn, has identical applications, yet it supports voice control and context recognition, enabling back-and-forth, natural conversations, which 66% of customers prefer.
Although conversational IVR software has multiple internal and external applications, it’s most often used to generate calls by qualifying prospects based on their attributes and call lengths.
Employing human agents is essential for handling high-value prospects and intercepting calls that are too complex for artificial intelligence to handle. The number of human agents should vary based on your inbound volumes and niche complexity.
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