An IVR or interactive voice response is a technology that allows callers to interact with a phone system using DTMF codes or voice commands. Traditionally IVR technology was only available to midsize and large companies with the IT budget to buy and maintain these systems, which were inflexible and highly complex to change once deployed in production. With the rise of cloud based phone systems, now any business regardless of their size can access the same IVR technology as the largest corporations in the world for a low monthly price that includes web based administration, making them manageable by any user. 

Although IVR technology and business communications have evolved significantly in the past decade, without contextual information and data, these systems continue to be siloed and can’t deliver a true one on one experience to the end customer. Companies with large budgets usually deploy custom integrations with their in house systems to provide automated response menus, enhanced call routing and more; but if you are using Salesforce as your CRM there is a smarter way.

Best in-class Salesforce CTI vendors on the AppExchange, provide IVR technology that has been pre-integrated with Salesforce to enable companies to route calls based on Salesforce data like: object owners, custom fields, case & order numbers and much more, out of the box. No coding required.

Let’s dive in and see the top 3 benefits of integrating your IVR with Salesforce:

1. Reduce average handle time and call transfers

Using the caller ID of the inbound caller, modern phone systems like PhoneIQ can automatically query Salesforce to check if the number belongs to an existing object within the CRM like: contact, lead, account, case or opportunity. If a match is found, the caller can be automatically routed to the object owner in Salesforce. This will significantly reduce average handle time (AHT) and call transfers, key inbound call center KPIs that track the average time spent on each call by each agent and call transfers due to inefficient call routing. 

2. Delight customers with one on one relationships at scale

How many times have you dialed an airline or big corporation only to find the agent is unknowledgeable about your past conversations or open cases with the company. More often than not, you are transferred multiple times, put on hold and even worse, have to explain everything over and over again as you are being transferred across departments. With modern Salesforce IVR technology, companies can leverage prebuilt Salesforce field lookups to route callers and present agents with the right information on screen every time. These prebuilt lookups enable callers to input things like case or order number on the IVR and query Salesforce automatically, even providing capabilities to query custom fields in Salesforce (e.g.: field “customer number”), and if a match is found route the caller automatically and present the agent with contextual information on screen based on the callers input, e.g.: the right case, product order or customer account. 

3. Increase call center efficiency with automated menus

Modern IVR systems can help increase call center efficiency by automatically resolving simple customer needs and queries that would otherwise be normally handled by a call center agent.

• Some common examples of these type of queries are:
• Check order status
• Check account balance
• Check case status
• Pay an open invoice
  

To perform these actions, an IVR requires to be integrated with external business systems and databases. Industry leading Salesforce CTI vendors provide real time call control technology that enables for this customized interaction seamlessly, enabling callers to resolve their inquiries without ever connecting with a live agent. 

If you want to test out a complete Salesforce IVR & CTI solution, signup for your PhoneIQ free trial today. No credit cards or commitments required.