Businesses have been using voice broadcasts and interactive voice response (IVR) for years to automate tasks like customer appointment reminders and delivery confirmations. They can be powerful tools for cutting costs and reducing lost revenue from no-shows.
But you might not know that companies are also using voice broadcasts and IVRs to effectively communicate with their own employees and consultants. Below are a few use cases for how businesses are using voice broadcast and IVR to improve internal communications.
Use Case #1: Proactively Alert Consultants About New Projects
Many businesses that rely on consultants use an outbound IVR to notify them of new job openings and gauge their interest in performing the work. They build and send out a new outbound IVR phone survey each week to their consultant contact base that plays a recorded list of unfilled projects, and consultants can press the appropriate number on their phone keypad to express interest in a job. Some of these IVR phone surveys also give the listener the option of being transferred directly from the IVR to a live person to ask any follow-up questions.
Use Case #2: Automate Employee Emergency Phone Notifications
Emergencies can spring up that require an organization to make immediate contact with a large group of employees. A phone call is often the best way to communicate important information during an emergency, but calling each employee manually can take too much time. That’s why many organizations rely on voice broadcasting.
Using voice broadcasting you can pre-record a notification informing employees of the emergency and any important instructions. Then, simply upload a spreadsheet with all of your employees’ names and phone numbers and click “send.”
For example, when there is a weather emergency that forces your office, school, or daycare center to close, a simple voice broadcast can let all your workers know quickly. And if any of your employees misses the phone call, the system will leave the message as a voicemail.
Use Case #3: Have Employees Clock In and Out with an Inbound IVR
Businesses that send employees out to work at remote job sites don’t always have a way for them to clock in and clock out. So many set up an inbound IVR for employees to call into when working at a remote location. For example, if you have carpenters or landscapers doing work throughout the city, they can each call in before starting a job to confirm the time that they started working. They can type in their own unique pin number in their phone keypad to “clock in”. Then, after the job has been completed, have them call in again to confirm that the job is done and leave any special notes regarding the work and billing.
You can even integrate the inbound IVR with your CRM system and have the information automatically passed and stored. This not only helps keep track of employees’ hours, but also makes it easy to generate accurate invoices for each job.
Learn More About Voice Broadcasting an IVR
With voice-based marketing automation technology, it’s easy for businesses to build their own personalized, interactive voice broadcasts and IVRs to automate employee communication. To learn more about the benefits of using voice-based marketing automation to create voice broadcasts and IVRs, download our white paper “New Ways to Integrate Intelligent Voice Broadcasting into Your Marketing and Sales Strategy.”