Video: What Is an IVR?

Tom Baker at Vonage explains what an IVR is.

What Is an IVR?

Tom Baker (Vonage)

Historically, an IVR was interactive voice response.

It’s a feature within your PBX or your contact centre system that allows you to present a menu to a caller that they can interact with, typically via the keys on their telephone keypad.

You know, everyone’s interacted with these, where you press one for sales, press two for service. The feature has expanded.

It now effectively encompasses all of the technology that allows you to control a caller’s experience throughout a telephone system, from the point that they ring your number, all the way through to the point where they actually speak to a person.

That would be your IVR technology that can be used to control the caller’s experience in its entirety.

And, depending on how you build your IVR and what you’re trying to do with it, you may never actually deliver a call to a person. You may instead serve the entirety of the customer’s requirements from within that menu and that automated experience.

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Author: Tom Baker
Reviewed by: Robyn Coppell