My questions a rather simple one but one with many answers.

How have some of you increased your IVR resolutions? To clarify, what tactics have you employed to resolve a customer's call while in the IVR before they reach an agent?

My company has both a DTMF and a Speech driven IVR and we basically want to increase the amount of calls resolved in the IVR without causing customers to abandon the call due to frustration or long wait times. Currently, we employ troubleshooting as well as play outage messages to customers calling in from areas experiencing outages to aid in alleviating calls to our agents.

What tactics have you successfully used in the past to increase IVR resolved calls?

One of the keys to improving call completion within the IVR is having a clear understanding of why customers are calling in the first place and designing the IVR application from a customer perspective. Successful IVR apps must be intuitive to the user, so keeping them as simple as possible helps as is making sure they are appropriate to the customer's need.

Understanding the reason for calls gives you the opportunity to pre-empt the likely reason for a specific call (such as your outage messages) and allows you to put the most likely ones at the front of the DTMF menus. With speech you can be a bit more flexible, especially if you are using the "say anything" type technologies, but could pre-emptively prompt for specific and likely call reasons.

Some of the best IVR apps are the simplest - things like call backs if queues are long, or simple account balance type apps where the caller knows they dont need to speak to an agent.

Hope this helps some.
Dave

This is helpful, Dave! Striving to lower tech calls in our overall goal as well as to attempt to further increase our IVR resolutions for inbound Tech calls. Customers, international and billing do not have the pressures to increase IVR resolutions as Tech currently does.

Our Speech and DTMF IVR options do place our outage messages in front if the customer’s zipcode can be determined.

I'm looking for some out of the box tactics used to increase IVR resolutions. Resolution can be as simple as hanging up...but hanging up without actually abandoning the call. I know were getting down to simple symatics here but we really want to try some other tactics without causing repeat calls.

For exmaple, I was calling a company called GameStop this weekend during a peak time for them. The IVR greeted me accordingly and gave me a set of options, once I got to an option destine for an agent I was told their call volume was too high and was advised to callback later.

This is the type of message we DO NOT want to play to our customers because that will ultimately cause repeat calls. I actually called right back, was given the same message, then called back a third time and got through therefore solidifying the fact that this type of message will not work.

Anyone else using some less pervasive tactics to increase IVR Tech Resolutions?

I suggest IVR is optional and not forced, nothing grinds my gears more than being forced through several options of an IVR only to end up with an agent that I could have arrived at 60 seconds earlier. " please enter your account number, this will help us deal with your call more quickly". will it?
Why am I asked for the same information on connecting with an adviser nine times out of ten.
This is not about customer experience this is about cost, therefore IMO I believe IVR self service should be a customer choice, or at least make it clear to the caller that at any point during the call they can connect to an adviser if they so wish.

Sorry I don't know exactly what type of business you have, but here are scenarios and solutions I've used in the past:
1) Utility/Service Outage--IVR took the customers phone number, and told them a ticket was being opened with the techs. The techs tied tickets to a primary outage. when that outage was cleared, the ticket was closed, which triggered an automated call out to the customer to let them know the issue was resolved.
2) Tech Support calls--ACD handled Audio FAQs and IVR processing password resets
3) RMA/Order status lines--IVR providing Order status, Shipping confirmation and tracking information.