Everyone has a horror story to tell about having to call into a business for information only to be lost in an endless loop of pushing buttons and listening to menus. In some cases, it seems that all menu selections just keep routing back to the main menu and trying to choose between limited options often leaves you having to click through the entire menu to find just what you need.
In these cases, many people long for the days when calls were answered by a live operator. The caller provided the request and the operator then routed the call through the right department or professional, providing a much higher level of customer satisfaction with the service.
The reality is that for businesses with a large volume of inbound calls, live operators are costly, ineffective and tend to result in longer wait times for customers. This, in turn, creates dissatisfaction with the company for a completely different set of reasons.
A Better Option
Top companies providing answering service systems provide a better option for customer-focused businesses. This is the use of a speech enabled auto attendant that can actually listen to and understand just what caller’s need.
With these services all incoming calls can be answered within a specific time frame, often in seconds of the call being connected. The caller then speaks to the system in a natural, conversational fashion to request information or to be connected with a specific professional or department.
The Advantages of a Speech Enabled Auto Attendant
As a business, using a speech enabled auto attendant instead of a menu and push to connect type of system offers several advantages. They include:
* Increased customer satisfaction – when customers have a positive experience calling into the business they report higher trust levels with the business and a higher overall satisfaction rating. Being put on hold, long delays, incorrect routing of calls or menus that are difficult to navigate have the opposite effect.
* Decreased calls to live operators – some calls will require the support of a live operator. The speech enabled auto attendant can be set up to automatically connect the caller to a live operator under specific circumstances, ensuring the customer gets the help and support required. This process will dramatically decrease the number of calls operators have to handle, making their response time faster and increasing efficiency.
* Ease of Directory Management – new employees, changes in phone numbers and other issues with the directory are easily and quickly changed within the system. This eliminates callers being routed to the wrong number or misinformation provided by live operators using outdated data.
The use of these systems will make a real impression on customers and the business. Cost-effective, efficient and professional, they provide the caller experience everyone wants to have.
