IVR system
Give customers a faster, more intuitive way to reach the right support with Dialpad’s IVR for cloud contact centres. Built for growing and enterprise teams, Dialpad helps route callers by intent, skill set, and business need while keeping customer context connected across every interaction.
What is IVR and what is an IVR system?
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is the name given to the technology which allows a caller to interact with a telephone system using their voice or by pressing numbers on a keypad.
An interactive voice response system, therefore, is an automation feature that utilises that technology as part of your process for handling inbound calls. You'll find IVR systems or features as part of most VolP services.
In practice, the work is that the IVR system answers customer calls for you and presents the caller with a menu of routing options. Callers choose an option based on their needs and the IVR routes them accordingly.
Modern IVR telephony systems typically offer callers a range of self-service options, too, such as checking their account balance or changing their password. This leaves contact centre agents free to handle more complex issues and questions.
IVR for cloud contact centres
Dialpad's contact centre and communications platform gives businesses IVR for intelligent routing, and much more:
Easy call routing
With Dialpad, you can route calls to agents based on availability, skill level, idle time or the call pattern of your choice. You can record or upload a customised greeting so callers know how to route themselves to the right place. Plus, you can route calls to other departments, to voicemail, and more.
Manage queues without adding friction
Keep customers moving with callback and queue management that gives teams more flexibility during high-volume periods. Dialpad helps contact centers manage inbound demand, route callers to the right available resource, and reduce unnecessary wait time while preserving a better customer experience.
Build and update call flows with less effort
Create and adjust routing paths with a drag-and-drop call flow builder designed for contact center teams. Admins can update menus, routing rules, queues, fallback paths, and escalation flows without rebuilding the customer experience from scratch.
Keep context connected across channels
Customers should not have to restart the conversation every time they switch channels or move from self-service to an agent. Dialpad keeps voice, digital interactions, and customer context connected in a single agent workspace, so teams can pick up with the history they need and deliver a more consistent experience without unnecessary resets.
Simple call forwarding
Expecting a call, but need to step out of the office? With Dialpad’s call forwarding, you can. Add up to five forwarding numbers and forward calls to your colleague, mobile, landline or a whole other department一and never miss an important call again. You can even forward voicemails and SMS messages!
Integrations with tools you love
Dialpad integrates with all your favourite tools, including Salesforce, Zendesk, Google Workspace, HubSpot, Microsoft Teams and more. Need a custom integration? You can build your own with Dialpad’s open API and webhooks.
Robust analytics
Dialpad's platform incorporates a robust suite of analytics, providing business leaders with powerful tools to transform raw call data into strategic insights. Reporting features and filters are built with contact center needs in mind, delivering deeper visibility into both agent performance and the customer journey, helping you manage operations with precision.
Speaks your callers’ language
If you have customers with different language preferences, you’ll need an IVR application that can accommodate them. Dialpad’s IVR solutions support a range of languages, including English (British, US, and Australian), Japanese, French, Spanish, Chinese, Italian and more. You can customise the language for individual call centres, departments or even users.
Interactive Voice Response benefits
An IVR phone system feature like that included with Dialpad can offer your business a range of benefits that improve agent productivity and customer satisfaction. Here are just a few of the principal advantages of an effective IVR call system:
Increases first contact resolution (FCR)
Intelligent routing via IVR ensures customers speak to the agent who’s best qualified to help them. This means customers are more likely to have their issues resolved first time, increasing their satisfaction一and your first contact resolution (FCR) rate.
Consider this simplified interactive voice response example. A customer calls your business and interacts with your IVR platform. Either by speaking or pressing the relevant numbered options, the caller informs your system that their query is about the payment of a bill. Smart IVR functionality could then ensure that the call’s routed to someone in accounts or who’s otherwise capable of answering such a query.
Provides a better and more consistent customer experience
Your IVR interface is often a customer’s first interaction with your company. A good IVR system can therefore give customers a great first impression.
For example, Dialpad’s IVR is fully customisable and you can integrate it with your CRM and other software to give callers an omnichannel experience. That way, callers don’t have to repeat information一all their past interactions are already in front of the agent.
CRM integrations can also allow IVRs to identify callers from their phone numbers so they can address the caller by name. This further personalises the experience.
You can programme the IVR, too, to tell callers where they are in the queue, putting customers in control. Do they want to keep waiting or would they rather leave a message?
Also, by including answers to common customer questions, IVRs can quickly resolve queries. This means they can really help increase customer satisfaction and retention.
Improves morale by freeing employees from repetitive tasks
IVR solutions automate the call handling process, meaning agents can focus on more time- and energy-intensive issues without the hassle of repetitive manual tasks. This boosts their morale, which in turn improves their productivity and efficiency.
Automating repetitive tasks also eliminates the human errors that can arise from manual routing and call transfer. That means IVRs can improve call centre productivity, too.
Also, IVR systems like Dialpad’s come with sophisticated routing options一handy for periods of high call volume. It also means agents will only get calls they have the skills to deal with, which stops them getting overwhelmed (and reduces customer frustration).
An effective IVR feature (and much more)
Dialpad’s IVR feature can answer every inbound call, allowing you to provide excellent service at no extra cost. It’s also part-and-parcel of our overall contact centre software, so you can manage all aspects of your inbound and outbound calls from a single interface.
Dialpad’s IVR has sophisticated call routing and self-service options. Customers get the help they need first time and your call centre agents can prioritise their workflows to solve more complex issues.
IVR comes as standard in all Dialpad’s plans. And that’s not all. With Dialpad, you’ll also get unlimited calling, real-time analytics, easy call forwarding, live AI coaching and more, all in one place.
The best IVR system is built right in
Why pay for (and manage) a separate IVR software when it could be built into your phone system or contact centre platform? See how easy it is to set up in Dialpad by booking a demo.
FAQs about IVR systems
Every IVR service provider's pricing is different, and can range pretty widely. Generally, the most cost-effective way to give your team access to IVR technology is by choosing a business phone system, communications platform, or contact centre software that has IVR built in.
These providers are typically SaaS providers, and will charge on a monthly or annual subscription model, which means your upfront costs are drastically reduced.
For example, Dialpad's pricing plans are available in a few tiers, and all of them come with an IVR system included—in addition to other features like unlimited calling in the US and Canada, custom voicemail greetings, off-hours routing, and more.
The Enterprise plan even comes with a 100% uptime guarantee.
Just as a rule of thumb, before you make a decision about which IVR platform to choose, look at two things: customer support (do you have to pay extra for it?) and what features are included in each pricing tier. This is where most IVR service providers will charge you extra for basic things if you're not careful.
Years ago, you would've needed a ton of expensive equipment to run an interactive voice response system—dedicated software on a separate computer, a database, a couple of servers, not to mention an IT team to install and look after everything.
But today, IVR is built right into some cloud-based communications platforms. (Like Dialpad!) It’s easy to set up and configure, and all the infrastructure is owned and maintained by your vendor, so it costs you less too.
How it works: When you get an inbound call, the IVR system springs into action and greets the caller with a pre-recorded welcome message and a list of options, which you’ve pre-programmed to fit your business' needs.
More advanced systems use speech recognition technology and will ask the caller to give a brief description of their reason for calling (e.g. “I need to change my password” or “I want to pay a bill”). These systems use AI to understand the words spoken by the caller.
Other systems will ask the caller to press a button on their phone’s keypad (“#1 for accounts, #2 for tech support,” and so on). They can detect the dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) tones from a phone’s keypad, and use the information to process the request.
When the system detects a simple inquiry, it may provide self-service options, or route the call to the right person or department as defined by your pre-set call routing rules. This may be based on availability skill set, or on a rotational basis.
If a caller wants to speak to someone who’s not picking up, the IVR menu can offer alternative options such as trying a different department or leaving a voicemail. (Dialpad’s IVR system can handle callers’ requests in both of these ways to make sure they get the right information as efficiently as possible.)
If your business isn’t already using an IVR solution, here are a few examples of how you can use it. There's contact centre routing—when your customers try to get in touch with you, the last thing you want is for your contact centre or call centre team to put you through to the wrong advisor. That’s where call routing comes in. In the specific case of contact centre routing, IVR makes sure all inbound calls are routed to the right agent, which keeps the average duration of calls low, since the vast majority of callers will be putting themselves in touch with the people who can resolve their issue quickly.
Being able to allow your callers route calls and do that heavy lifting for you also comes with an added bonus: It keeps your contact centre queues shorter, which creates a better customer experience overall.
IVR is also a fantastic way to get callers to provide feedback or answer short surveys. You can set up your IVR system to ask callers to answer a quick survey at some point during the call (ideally at the end—right in the middle tends to interrupt conversations). They’re a great tool for measuring customer satisfaction. For example, you can set up a CSAT (customer satisfaction) survey in Dialpad in just a few clicks, and Dialpad’s text-to-speech feature will automatically ask that question in your customer calls.
Finally, there's general office call routing, which is subtly different from contact centre routing, since most office calls will be going through to coworkers, receptionists, or other members of the office rather than a live agent in a call centre. Think of these calls as the types of phone calls you get at your HQ, rather than the ones that go to your customer support team in an inbound contact centre. You may still have someone at reception to greet visitors and pick up the phone when it does ring, but you can at least minimize those kinds of repetitive desk phone tasks with an IVR system that can take care of most of the call routing work. Long story short: Good IVR applications turn call routing into a self-service—and cut out the need to hire an operator or dedicated virtual receptionist.
Definitely. One industry-specific example for IVR is with bank and stock account transactions. These days, it’s pretty easy to check your account balances from your mobile device or computer. It’s just kind of how that customer experience has naturally progressed. An IVR system doesn’t make you recite your account number (or any other sensitive information, for that matter) to an actual person, and generally it’s pretty efficient since it’s all automated. Where human operatives might have call recording functionalities enabled automatically for all the calls they take, IVR systems don’t work this way.
An AI-powered IVR for cloud contact centers uses automation, natural language understanding, and routing logic to help customers reach the right resource faster. In a CCaaS platform, IVR can work with voice, digital channels, AI, and agent workflows to support more efficient customer experiences.
Conversational IVR lets customers explain what they need in natural language instead of navigating rigid phone menus. The system can use intent-based routing, skills-based routing, and queue logic to direct customers to the right team, AI Agent, or human agent.