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Importance of an IVR flow in a call center

By C Chaitanya
One of the most overlooked factors in implementing a call center is the IVR flow. Though we have one of the most powerful cloud telephony platforms,KooKoo, which allows you to create any IVR flow, many of our Cloudagent customers choose to just welcome a caller and connect them to an agent.

An agent is the most costly resource in a call center and we should make judicious use of their time. A well designed IVR system does just that.

Callers usually call for some information. If an IVR is intelligent enough to identify and give the information to the caller, the callers will be happy and your agents will be free to handle the more important calls.

We will look at some good design principles for IVR design


  1. Personalize the IVR. Greet the caller by name.
  2. Reduce the depth of the menus. More than 2 is not suggested or your callers can get lost in a menu maze.
  3. Provide enough queues. Play queue position and provide option to caller to get a callback.
  4. Play contextual information instead of the default hold music while waiting in the queue.
  5. Observe patterns of menu usage and move most used menus up.
  6. If more than 80% callers are calling for a particular information,make that the default. Play the details first and take them to the menu later.
  7. Always provide an option for easy navigation to the top and previous menus. 
  8. Provide options for the caller to quit at any time and receive a callback.
  9. Have good defaults for noinput and nomatch for DTMF inputs.
  10. Do AB testing of multiple flows
Check out different solutions on our site Ozonetel and design the proper IVR flow for your customers.
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