The biggest reason why people hate IVR is for the following scenario :-

User calls to IVR number and he gets to hear an welcome message and asked few options. After that the user is put on hold saying ‘All our customer care officers are busy, Your call is important to us, we will transfer the call to a customer care executive as soon as free. Thank you’ and this continue for 10 minutes, may be more! End result, caller disconnect, after few curse may be.

Most probably, many of us has faced this situation while dialing to Telecom customer care numbers (specially in India). But this kind of irritation and frustration can be reduced considerably by using a simple predictive dialer! Yes, instead of keeping the caller on old for many minutes, he should be given a simple option to press a number,saying press 2 if you want our executive to call you back as soon as they are free! Thank you!’ And let predictive dialer take care of the rest!

One must, specially call center owners, realise that people calling their call center or customer care, are also busy and need a quick solution to their problems. They should not be kept on hold for 10 odd minutes by playing messages informng how important their calls are! Better, they give him a call back. The customer care executive should have all the information which the caller entered in his previous IVR call. These features can be implemented using smart IVR software with built in predictive dialer.

How can an IVR application help ?
IVR can be used as very smart predictive dialer as I have posted earlier. Now same IVR can open a new thread or process which will get activated as soon a request for a call back by a caller is registered. This process will start monitoring any free customer care executive as when it finds one, it will immediately occupy seize the line and dial out the previous caller mobile.
As soon as the previous caller picks the phone, it will connect to the customer care officer and pop up the caller details as per his chosen options in his previous IVR call.

Advantages of this arrangement:

1. This will surely improve only customer satisfaction. Customer will not require to hold the line frustratingly.

2. This will increase efficiency of customer care executives as well as throughput of the call center.

3. Customer will be less irritated as they are no longer kept on hold for long time. Customer care exceutive will be less stressful as they will face less number irate customer.

4. Toll free numbers are paid by the call centers as per usage basis. While keeping a caller on hold, the minutes of usage increases for the call center organization. Even if the call center may belong to a telecom company, it still uses up precious finite resources, voice channels and decrease utilisation. So, IVR with predictive dialer can reduce cost of running call center.

Few enhancements :

An automatic SMS could be sent to the caller if he called form a mobile number informing he would receive a call from customer care with approximate time. Caller may be presented a request ID for the call back request.

I believe, this kind of a smart IVR with built int intelligent auto dialer feature will enhance customer experience of IVR and will help reduce hatred towards IVR.