How IVRs Improve Caller Experiences and Conversion Rates for Multi-Location Businesses

Phone calls are the main way consumers contact businesses in automotive, healthcare, financial services, insurance, home services, legal, and many other industries. They often find these businesses online, but when it comes time to engage, they call to schedule appointments, place orders, and get information before visiting a location. 

These phone calls are make-or-break moments in the customer and patient journey. Every time a location fails to answer a call or puts someone on hold, the business could lose that customer or patient forever. Yet despite their importance, multi-location brands often struggle to centrally manage calls to their locations, resulting in missed calls, inconsistent experiences, CX issues, and lost revenue.

If you work in CX, sales, operations, or marketing and your success depends on the experience your locations provide callers, there are technologies that can help. This blog explains how multi-location and franchise businesses can use IVR and call routing technology to improve call experiences and conversion rates at their locations. 

Managing Caller Experiences at Multiple Locations Can Be a Challenge 

Today, businesses are making the customer experience a top priority. They are implementing new strategies and technology to deliver more personalized, seamless, and helpful experiences to consumers who engage with them online or call their contact centers.

Phone calls to individual locations, however, are still unmanaged blind spots for too many businesses. Their locations and franchisees often operate in silos without central oversight, leading to costly but avoidable issues with inbound calls, including:    

• Unanswered phone calls: Calls to busy or closed locations go unanswered when they could have been rerouted to an available location or contact center agent. 
• Poor CX and conversion rates: Callers are sent to a location ill-equipped to assist or convert them when they should have been sent to a contact center agent who is trained to help.  
• Operational inefficiencies: Location staff waste time helping callers that should have been deflected by an IVR or handled by a different location, department, or agent.

If you want to standardize, automate, and improve the experience your locations provide callers, IVR and call routing technologies can help. 

Automate Call Qualification and Management With Conversational IVRs 

A big part of converting callers is connecting them with the best available location or agent to assist them. Who that is, however, varies depending on each caller’s intent, their location, and the structure of the business being called.  To qualify, route, and assist callers efficiently at scale, multi-location and franchise businesses can use IVRs (interactive voice response systems). 

What Is an IVR and How Can It Help Multi-Location Businesses?

IVRs are automated phone menus that businesses use to manage call volume at scale, assist and qualify callers, and route them to the best person to assist. IVRs can be used by multi-location businesses to automate and improve caller experience in many ways, including:

• Route callers by intent: Have the IVR ask why the person is calling (are they calling to book an appointment or rescheduling one, for example) and then route callers to the best location or agents to help. 
• Route callers by interest: IVRs can ask callers what product, service, or department they are calling for (such as sales vs. service or pediatrics vs. oncology) and route them accordingly.
• Route callers by ZIP code: Have the IVR ask callers to provide the ZIP code they are calling from and route them to the closest open location to assist.
• Screen for ineligible calls: Have IVRs ask questions to filter out callers your business can’t serve so your staff doesn’t waste time assisting them.
• Automate call handling: Have IVRs assist callers when locations are closed or busy. For example, the IVR can answer common questions or ask callers to request a call back.
• Help callers convert online: Instead of forcing callers to wait on hold, give the option for the IVR to text a link to complete their appointment or order online. 

With Invoca, anyone can create custom IVR phone menus in minutes without any coding or help from IT. Invoca IVRs are powered by natural language processing (NLP) so they can understand both voice responses and keypresses, providing better experiences for your callers.

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Reduce Unanswered Calls with Ring Group Routing 

You never want phone calls to busy or closed locations to go unanswered when you have other options available to assist them. So instead of sending calls to a single phone number that might not answer, ring group routing can forward the call to a list of phone numbers sequentially or simultaneously until someone answers. For example, you can use ring group routing to have your Invoca IVRs:  

• Forward unanswered calls to call centers: Route calls to a location first, but if they don’t answer, forward callers to your call center to assist.
• Ring every agents’ phone at once: Have calls ring every sales agent simultaneously — the first person who answers gets the call.
• Send more calls to your best sales agents: Have more calls forwarded to your top agents to increase your overall conversion rates.  

Invoca makes it easy to include ring group routing technology in your IVRs. So if you are an automotive dealership group, for example, you can have your IVR ask callers if they are calling for vehicle sales or service, and then use ring group routing to forward those who say “sales” to every sales agent’s phone at once — first one who answers gets it. Or if you are a healthcare franchise, you can have your IVRs ask callers for their ZIP code and route them to their closest location first. But if that location doesn’t answer in 15 seconds, forward the call to your contact center to assist.  

Use IVRs to Capture and Action Upon Numeric Data

Invoca IVRs can understand numerical data that callers provide such as account IDs, alternative phone numbers, and promo codes. Caller responses are captured and visualized in Invoca reports and are immediately actionable by IVR using real-time webhooks and integrations. This opens up a host of new ways multi-location businesses can use IVRs, including:

• Caller authentication: Verify if a caller’s customer ID or promo code is active or not and route them accordingly. 
• Digital ad retargeting: Capture an alternative phone number for the caller to more accurately retarget them with ads on Google and Facebook.‍
• Appointment scheduling: Callers can tell the IVR the day and time when they want for a new appointment or to reschedule an existing one.‍
• Callback requests: IVRs can take a caller’s phone number and have them confirm that they would like a call back and when.

Invoca Success Story: C2 Education

C2 Education is a leading provider of test prep, tutoring, and college counseling services, with over 180 education centers across the US. They use Invoca IVRs to qualify and route each caller to the best destination to assist them. 

When a call is placed to C2 Education:

1. The IVR first qualifies the caller as a new lead or current customer.
2. For new leads, the IVR routes them to the contact center where agents have the time and training to answer questions and convert callers to enrollments.
3. For existing customers, those who called a local center’s number are routed to that center. If they called a toll-free number, the IVR asks them to provide their ZIP code to route them to their closest education center.

Using Invoca IVRs, C2 Education has increased enrollments from prospects and decreased contact center call volumes and costs while providing better service to callers.

Read the full C2 case study here.

Invoca Success Story: University Hospitals

University Hospitals is a leading U.S. healthcare provider with more than 200 locations, 18 hospitals, and 55 health centers. They receive more than 400,000 calls a month and use Invoca to help provide them with the best experience. 

For example, Invoca uses real-time data from University Hospitals’ CRM to determine if callers have already seen a specific provider. Rather than having those callers go to a call center handling thousands of calls, Invoca routes them directly to their provider, helping to cut call center call duration by 50% and increase conversions by 300%.

“We have a responsibility to make sure that when patients call, they get the information and care they need, right when they need it,” said Noah Brooks, Manager of Digital Engagement and Analytics at University Hospitals. “That responsibility includes using better technology to create a better patient experience, which is why we implemented Invoca.” 

Read the full University Hospitals case study here.

Use Invoca IVRs With Any Location’s Phone System With No Disruptions

Invoca cloud-based IVRs are easy for CX, sales, operations, and marketing to configure and deploy themselves in minutes. You don’t need any technical skill to create them, and they work with every phone system you are already using, so you can create location-specific IVRs or national and regional ones. With Invoca, you get full reporting on IVR performance and caller responses, which you can use to detect and correct CX issues at locations, capture data on your consumers and patients, categorize callers by intent to measure and improve marketing results, and more.

To learn more, request a demo of the Invoca platform or visit our Conversational IVR product page.