Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Call Center IVR Technology: The Benefits of Segmenting and Analyzing Caller Profiles

We’ve all screened our personal calls from time to time, but many companies overlook some of the benefits of using call center IVR to analyze a caller’s profile. Call center IVR technology can be applied in different ways to address different callers. How can identifying your incoming calls improve your call center IVR? The information you gather about callers based on their phone numbers can be applied in various ways to improve customer service with your IVR technology:

1) Caller location: Have to put a caller on hold as they wait for an agent? The hold function provided by the call center IVR can be different for a caller in Chicago than a caller in Richmond—you might tell the caller in Chicago about a new store opening nearby, for instance. Your call center IVR may also benefit from changing personas according to location. A call from New York might respond more positively to an IVR with a New York accent, for instance. A caller from Oregon might not relate to a persona with a Southern accent, and so on. Consider customizing personas and sales pitches based on different locations for maximum impact with your call center IVR.

2) Language: If you have an incoming call from Mexico, it’s to your advantage to have your call center IVR respond in Spanish. Even if your call center IVR does not need to address most international calls, language preference is worth addressing. Callers from Quebec City will be much more responsive to a French call center IVR, while many callers from Southern California will appreciate a Spanish option.

3) Caller profiling: Many callers to a call center IVR will be repeat callers, and tracing repeat callers can yield many advantages for a call center IVR. A database of caller profiles and history is a great source of information for IVR technology, from customizing sales pitches to personalizing greetings. A recent article on TMC Net segments callers into different types and suggests that it may even be appropriate to segment callers based on their loyalty to the company. Callers with a history of being demanding or difficult, for instance, could be sent through to senior agents who would be better equipped to serve them. By keeping a record of repeat callers, a database of caller profiles can be used to service them accordingly with the call center IVR technology.