What is an Outbound IVR?

IVR stands for interactive voice response and is technology commonly used in contact centers. Most people are familiar with inbound IVRs - they play a recorded greeting when you call customer support and then provide a series of menu options. Outbound IVRs are lesser known, but still play a vital role in many contact centers by sending proactive, personalized messages to customers via phone, text or email. In that respect, outbound IVRs are related to predictive dialers, because they can operate in multiple channels and process requests without human intervention.

As an example, a cable company can use an outbound IVR to automatically call new customers to remind them about their upcoming installation appointments. The system may use artificial intelligence (AI) to customize the message with the date and time of the appointment and other relevant information. Some outbound IVRs will let customers interact with them using automatic speech recognition (ASR). In this example, the customer could reschedule their appointment through the IVR - no agent needed. But if the customer does feel like they need human interaction, the outbound IVR can connect them to a service representative at any time.

In the above scenario, the cable company can realize significant, measurable benefits by reducing costly missed appointments. Outbound IVRs can also provide other benefits. For example, they can improve the customer experience by facilitating proactive notifications such as those required by recalls. When integrated with the right systems, the outbound IVR can identify the customers who are impacted, personalize the messages for each customer, and automatically send out the communications – and do all this without the need to involve a costly live agent.

Given the right business needs, an outbound IVR can help organizations be more efficient and proactive.


How NICE is Redefining Customer Experience

NICE CXone is the industry’s only interaction-centric platform where channels, data, applications, and knowledge converge to improve customer experience at scale.

It is the leading, most complete and unified CX Platform on the market, used by thousands of organizations of all sizes around the world to help them consistently deliver exceptional customer experiences. CXone is a cloud native, unified suite of applications designed to help you holistically run your call (or contact) center operations.


Back to Glossary

Contact us

If you would like to know more about our platform or just have additional questions about our products or services, please submit the contact form. For general questions or customer support please visit our Contact us page.

×

NICE named a worldwide Leader in 2024 IDC MarketScape CCaaS report

Get the excerpt
IDC Logo
×