Marketing products or services via mass media to consumers can result in an enormous number of consumer responses, sometimes flooding a call center or even some IVR systems. If the media used is television or radio, the consumer responses arrive at a narrow, but predictable time, further challenging an IVR system’s capabilities. Having an IVR system that can handle the call load is just one critical issue that media marketers face in fulfilling their customer orders and accepting consumer payments.
There are other challenges that companies face when calls come in from a commercial advertisements. One such factor is the conversion ratio of calls to successful payment remittance. To put it another way, reducing the drop rate from calls and increasing the percentage of completed payments (orders); This is where the ability to A/B test various IVR scripts and workflows can be a huge factor.
Legacy IVR systems require development time from the IVR provider in order to “upload” scripts to enable the ability for any A/B testing, and that involves more money spent to the IVR system provider. For each new script, more dollars are invested.
Not any longer! Next generation IVR systems have a user interface that makes it easy to insert new scripts for an existing IVR workflow. Within the IVR user interface is the ability to clone an existing workflow and edit either the text to speech scripts or upload voice talent WAV files, making A/B testing a piece of cake. No longer required is the IVR development team needed for performing this task. Moreover, there’s no additional expense. This ability alone is a huge advantage to media marketers who accept orders by phone.
In some cases a given company might wish to present an up-sell opportunity once the order has been taken and the payment remitted. This is where the payment gateway API comes into play. Many gateway systems would require the up-sell transaction to be an additional re-entry of credit card information. A better way to handle an ups-sell transaction would be for the gateway to respond to the IVR system via a webhook with a reference token from the first transaction that can be used for any up-sell that a consumer chooses to opt for.
Order fulfillment is also a factor for media marketers using IVR for consumer orders. Name and address can’t be keyed-in from a phone like credit card information. So, having an IVR system that records clearly and makes the audio files available via API is a valuable feature for media marketers. Further, phone numbers can be captured and matched to any phone number that could be keyed-in, providing the marketing company two sources of contact information should there be a discrepancy or an issue with the ship-to or customer name audio flies.
If you are interested in exploring next generation IVR ordering and payments remittance technology for your company, reach to us here at Agile Payments and let us explore options with you.
