What Is an IVR?

The phone menu that decides where a call goes, what a good dealership one sounds like, and how to keep it from burying the customer.

Interactive voice response. The same three letters mean other things in trading and in medicine; on a phone system they mean the recorded menu that answers a call and acts on what the caller does next. An IVR does four jobs in order. It answers, so no call rings out unanswered. It identifies the business with a greeting. It collects an input, a key press or a spoken word. And it routes the call to a person, a group of phones, a mailbox or another branch of the menu.

The simplest version, a greeting and a short list of departments, is often called an auto attendant. The term IVR is usually reserved for anything with more logic than that: different branches for business hours and after hours, a branch that takes a spoken answer, a branch that plays information and hangs up. The useful way to think about it is that an IVR is the first employee every caller meets, and the only one who works every hour of the week. Other phone terms are defined in the automotive sales glossary.

Short. A store that answers well has a greeting of about eight seconds and three or four choices: press 1 for sales, 2 for service, 3 for parts, 0 for the operator. Say a store takes 250 inbound calls on a Saturday, illustrative figures only: 120 of them are service customers who would otherwise tie up a salesperson, 90 are sales calls that need a person on the floor in under thirty seconds, and the rest are vendors, wrong numbers and people looking for directions. The menu is what sorts those without a human making the first decision.

After hours the same number needs a different answer. A call at nine on a Tuesday night should hear the store's own recorded greeting, be offered the chance to leave a message, and, if the store wants it, be forwarded to whoever is on call. A caller who hears a menu that assumes the showroom is open, and then reaches a phone ringing in an empty building, has learned something about the store that no advertisement will fix.

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The most common mistake is depth. Three levels of menu to reach a person is a design for a utility company, not a car store where the caller is holding a listing on their phone and has two other dealerships in the browser. A caller should reach a human on the first or second press, always, and there should be a path to a person for the customer who presses nothing at all.

The second mistake is the recording itself. A greeting recorded on a cell phone in the parking lot, with traffic in the background, is the first impression of a store selling fifty thousand dollar vehicles. The third is measurement: plenty of stores have no idea how many callers give up inside the menu, because nobody has ever looked at the call log. A menu is a piece of merchandising and it deserves the same attention as a window sticker.

LeadLocate CRM includes a call flow builder where a store lays out its own menu: a greeting, the options a caller can press, where each one sends the call, and a separate path for hours the store is closed. Audio is either recorded in the browser or uploaded, revisions are kept so an earlier version can be restored, and the whole thing is described on the IVR call flow builder with the click by click on how to build an IVR call flow.

Around the menu sit the controls that decide what a live call actually does. A virtual receptionist can be switched on or off, business hours can be set to any schedule including around the clock, and call screening lets whoever picks up hear who is calling and press a key to take the call, covered on virtual receptionist and call screening. A Forward Calls To ring list built from the store's own users decides which phones ring and in what order, described on call forwarding and ring lists. Every call that comes through, answered or missed, is recorded, transcribed and written to the customer's communications log with the rest of the conversation, so a menu is not a place where calls disappear.

An auto attendant is the plain version: a greeting and a list of departments. An IVR is the same idea with logic behind it, which is why a system with hours, branches and recorded information is called an IVR and a two option greeting usually is not. A virtual receptionist is a feature name for the automated answer itself, the thing that greets and screens before a person is involved. An answering service is people, a third party who picks up when the store cannot and takes a message.

A store can use all of them at once and many do: a menu during business hours, screening on the forwarded calls so a salesperson knows what they are picking up, and a recorded greeting with a mailbox overnight. What matters is that the caller reaches a human quickly, and that every call ends up on a record the store can read the next morning.

What does IVR mean on a phone system?

Interactive voice response: the automated system that answers an incoming call, plays a greeting and routes the caller by the key they press or what they say. It is the phone menu callers hear before a person picks up.

Is an IVR the same as an auto attendant?

An auto attendant is the simplest kind of IVR: a greeting and a short list of departments. IVR is the broader term for a menu with real logic behind it, such as separate paths for business hours and after hours or a branch that plays information.

How many options should a dealership menu have?

Three or four, with a path to a live person on the first or second press and a fallback for the caller who presses nothing. Depth is what makes callers hang up, and a car shopper has other dealerships open on their phone.

Do calls that come through a menu still get logged?

In LeadLocate they do. Every call, answered or missed, is recorded, transcribed and written to the customer communications log along with the texts, emails and voicemails on the same record.

A specialist builds a menu, sets business hours and forwards a live call to a ring list on a real account, so you can judge the first thirty seconds of a phone call.

Prefer to talk right now? Call or text 844-376-2274.