Create Customized, Dynamic, and Natural IVR Experiences

What is an IVR?

Although most people have interacted with IVR technology, a frequent question that surfaces tend to be, ‘What does IVR stand for?’

IVR stands for interactive voice response. IVRs allow inbound callers to interact with a telephone system through voice prompting or touch-tone keypads usually called an IVR menu or IVR options.

In doing so, the IVR system routes callers to varying automated options as a means to provide what the caller is looking for - whether to a customer service rep or an additional company for information.

Voiceflow acts as the single source of truth for your team when it comes to the creative IVR process, supporting every stage of the IVR workflow - from scripting and flow design, to detailing conversational logic.

Each part of the process is dynamic and interlinked so that you don't have to worry about making changes on outdated documents. Once the design is complete, IVR testing and prototyping is possible across a variety of mediums, including browser tests with sharable links and real call simulators on your phone.

By having a single system for collaboratively managing your IVR system, you can increase your speed to market by shortening iteration cycles and producing higher quality prototypes faster.

The modern IVR system is changing with increasing advancements in NLP and machine learning. IVR systems are becoming stateful, incorporating concepts like conversational design to make them smarter, and drive higher ROI through increasing containment rates. Voiceflow makes this switch from call flow to stateful design easy to manage with concepts like dialog management and situational design incorporated into our visual builder.

Voiceflow is built for teams and supports real-time collaboration which allows you and your team to work on projects collaboratively at the same time, similar to cloud-based tools like Google Docs. This means the whole team can be working on Voiceflow in tandem, prototyping and commenting while others build.

An IVR system takes planning, collaborating, and iterating in order to create the most user friendly process. But there are certain experiences consumers expect when they’re interacting with a conversational IVR experience:

Visual IVR: Conversations are rarely linear, so why would you design an automated conversation in an unnatural way? By using Visual IVR tools like Voiceflow, you can design contextual dialogues and intents for natural conversation between IVR and caller.  


IVR PIN: Almost all phone systems require some sort of authentication that will be passed on to an agent or to personalize the experience. IVR pins are the way a system is going to identify a new customer or an existing customer to create a more contextual experience.

IVR Menu: Also known as IVR Options. When you call into an IVR, usually customers are presented with a few options of paths they can take that the system will lead them down. This menu can be presented through the phone keypad or through voice recognition.