Automated interactive voice response - IVR - is commonly used as a way of reminding patients about medical appointments. It reduces the number of ‘no shows’ and helps healthcare professionals cut costs.

If your company depends on telephone communications to service customers and make business run more efficiently, you can benefit from phone dialing software. Many people think that phone dialing software is just for companies with large call centers and hundreds of employees making thousands of calls per minute. Phone representatives can quickly get from one call to another, as phone numbers are programmed to autodial the customer list.

For most call centers, a key performance indicator is a low average handling time (AHT). Managing the amount of time callers spend in contact with the call center typically includes hold time, total talk time, and any additional work an agent must complete after the call; this number is divided by the number of calls handled by the agent to determine AHT.

IVR is one of the most underused pieces of technology at the disposal of the modern business. Not as intuitively understood as mass text messaging, IVR is approached with caution, and sometimes not approached at all.

IVR, or Interactive Voice Response Technology, is something every real estate agent should utilize. Why? Rather than spending most of your budget on marketing hoping the phone will ring, or losing sleep because you don’t want to miss a call, you could use IVR, a simple yet highly-effective tool more commonly known as the “call capture hotline.”

Interactive Voice Response has become an indispensable tool for sales and customer service calls. IVR reduces costs by minimizing time spent on the phone by live agents, and it allows for efficient customer service around the clock. Clearly it’s all about the money: a live agent phone call can cost upwards of twenty-five dollars, while the average call cost for IVR is less than a quarter. Knowing when and where to utilize IVR is another matter altogether.