Liverpool Football Club is installing interactive voice response (IVR) technology next year so it can switch internal resources from dealing with ticket sales to solving customer service issues.

The call centre is limited and can struggle to cope with spikes in demand, according to Liverpool IT manager Ken Webster.

“When there was a Cup game, we blew a BT exchange with the volume of phone calls,” he said.

“We discovered that 80,000 calls were coming from 20,000 unique numbers so lots of people were having to redial.

“An IVR platform is automated and it can increase the number of stations dealing with calls.”

The biggest potential challenge will be integrating the IVR technology into back-end applications.

"The inhibitor becomes how many people the back-office system can deal with booking seats,” said Webster.

“The block is moved along the line, but we can increase power and use queuing systems,’ he said.