Blog

Inbound interactive voice response (IVR) technology was invented in the 1960s, and is currently used in tens of thousands of contact centers worldwide.

However, augmented by recent advancements in AI, it is now possible to design and implement intelligent outbound IVRs that contact the customer on your behalf, and fully automate certain types of customer interactions.

Many contactSPACE customers currently use a form of outbound IVR technology to automate sales calls, customer surveys, and appointment reminders and rescheduling, among many other types of more complex outbound interactions.

In this article, we’ve explained a bit about how outbound IVR works and what you need to know when deploying it, so you can understand how you might use this technology in your contact center.

What is outbound IVR?

IVR technology allows the customer to achieve a desired outcome on a call, without ever interacting with a live agent.

Using an automated voice, the IVR might prompt the customer to “press one for billing-related enquiries” for example, and direct their call accordingly.

Outbound IVR involves making an agentless outbound call, and connecting the customer to an IVR system once they answer the phone.

Modern outbound IVR deployments take advantage of AI technology to facilitate a much more natural conversation using natural language processing, without always relying on the customer pressing numbers on their keypad to direct the call.

Outbound IVR is similar to inbound IVR in some ways, but comes with its own set of considerations, especially when it comes to compliance and dialing.

It is also worth mentioning, it is possible to initiate outbound calls with a live agent and later transfer to an IVR, if this would make the most sense for your outbound workflow.

However, most contactSPACE customers use outbound IVR to initiate the interaction, and fully automate many different types of outbound conversations.

Dialing strategy

Before deploying an outbound IVR system, there are a few key considerations to keep in mind when it comes to your dialing strategy.

Here at contactSPACE, most customers performing agentless calling use predictive dialing to maximize efficiency.

Using this dialing strategy, calls are made at scale, and live answers are connected automatically to the IVR.

Importantly, answering machine detection is used to ensure that only real human answers are directed to the IVR system.

Usually, the main consideration before using predictive dialing is whether or not sufficient numbers of live agents are available, ensuring that someone is always able to answer connected calls, and minimizing the chances of abandonment.

With agentless dialing, this is generally less of a concern, unless one of the potential outcomes of the IVR is that the call is transferred to a live agent.

In this case, it’s important to strike a balance in choosing the volume of calls you are making: placing enough calls to minimize live agent idle time, while avoiding placing so many calls that customers cannot get transferred to a live agent when needed.

Contact strategy

Apart from how you are dialing, it is also important to consider your broader contact strategy, in order to maximize your chances of getting in touch on each call that you make.

If making large numbers of outbound IVR calls, even a small improvement in your answer rates can make a significant difference to the success of your campaign.

At a basic level, contactSPACE customers often use CLID rotation when performing agentless calling.

Using this strategy, the most appropriate phone number to display to the customer is used on each dialing attempt, to maximize the likelihood of the call being answered.

For instance, if a mobile number is not answered on the first attempt, a landline may be used on the second call, or vice versa. And more broadly, phone number reputation is carefully managed to maximize answer rates per-number.

contactSPACE also allows you to use other tactics such as call-time optimization: scheduling the call for the time of day when the contact is most likely to answer the phone, in order to maximize the chances of the call being picked up.

Compliance considerations

In many jurisdictions, automated outbound calling is specifically regulated, especially when tied to solicitation (sales-related activities).

This often means that customer consent is required before an outbound IVR call can be placed, or that this type of contact is restricted to only certain types of communication.

The second main compliance consideration when using an outbound IVR is managing abandonment, if calls can be transferred to a live agent in the IVR tree.

Usually, when predictive dialing with live agents, a call is considered abandoned when the recipient has no-one to speak to within a certain amount of time after answering the call – usually two seconds.

Depending on the jurisdiction, failed IVR transfers to live agents on an outbound call can also be considered abandoned.

For example, in the UK, according to Ofcom, abandonment can occur when “Interactive Voice Messaging (IVM) systems are used and [they ask] the call recipient to interact before speaking to an agent but then fail to connect them.”

In many cases, you may also need to explicitly state to the customer that they are speaking to an automated voice when initiating the call, again depending on the jurisdiction.

Building the IVR

Most contactSPACE customers build their outbound IVR inside a communications platform such as Twilio or Zoom.

contactSPACE then sits inside this platform as a native add-on, helping to manage data orchestration, dialing, and contact strategy.

Historically, outbound IVR systems were built in much the same way as inbound IVRs.

The IVR tree would begin with a prerecorded voice message, and the customer could then navigate the interaction using DTMF tones, pressing numbers on their handset to choose different options.

However, most contactSPACE customers are now using AI to build smarter, more successful outbound IVR systems, which offer a better customer experience (and often better talk-time compared to a human agent as well).

The system still utilizes an IVR tree with outcomes you control, but virtual agents are used to guide the conversation more naturally compared to using rigid if/then rules.

Using AI also allows you to more accurately capture complicated verbal inputs from customers, such as saying their name, or specifying a product or service, helping to improve the customer experience.

AI can also infer customer sentiment in a way that is not possible with a traditional IVR workflow, allowing you to do things such as offering upsells to your most satisfied customers, or transferring less satisfied prospects to a live agent.

Taking outbound booking reminder calls as an example, and building on Twilio, the basic workflow to reschedule an appointment could look something like this:

At times, rather than building a complete call tree, you may set up specific events or triggers that can occur within a conversation, in order to progress the call towards different possible outcomes.

Managing callbacks

Another important but less obvious consideration when deploying outbound IVR is how callbacks are managed.

Apart from live calls that are transferred to an agent, you may also want to enable the customer to request a time to receive a callback from a live agent.

Most contactSPACE customers use AI technology to help capture the customer’s preferred time for a callback, and confirm this with them on the call.

These callbacks can then be handled as a part of a separate initiative (a campaign in contactSPACE) attached to live agents.

Often, preview or progressive dialing is used on these callback initiatives, to allow agents to read and digest relevant customer details before dialing, and deliver a better experience on the call.

These details can be pushed from the CRM or another data source, with some datapoints potentially being captured by the outbound IVR system during the initial call.

Final advice

Agentless dialing combined with an IVR system is becoming an increasingly powerful way to improve efficiency and deliver a better customer experience when outbound dialing – often with increased talk-time compared to using live agents.

The technology is now proven, and is being used by many contactSPACE customers to achieve strong results on many different types of campaigns.

When deciding whether to use outbound IVR, the main things to consider are:

• Which types of contact you are making would it make sense to fully automate?
• Given the geographic location of the customers and your business, and the context of the conversation, what compliance issues could arise from automating outbound contact?

If you’re looking for a way to set up outbound IVR in your contact center, learn more about contactSPACE AI agents and their use cases, or contact us today.