TMCnet LOGIN
Webinars
Hosted Contact Center Featured Article
On-Demand IVR Technology Plus Voice Recognition Equals an IVR You Can Actually Like
Let's face it: the traditional IVR (interactive voice response) is a favorite technology to very few people. Expensive to install and maintain, companies implemented them because they had to: few organizations can pay live agents to pick up and route every call by hand. Customers generally groaned inwardly faced with the prospect of having to listen to a monotonous menu and “press one” or “press two.” IT departments found designing IVR menus about as much fun as a root canal.
The good news is that more successful contact centers have realized that those days are over, thanks to today's on-demand application delivery and speech technologies. By combining cutting-edge voice recognition technology with the advanced capabilities of today's on-demand IVR technologies, contact centers can now quickly create voice applications – often by using simple drag-and-drop functions – that provide truly useful (as opposed to truly annoying) self-service options to your customers.
By offloading the most common customer requests – account balances, store locations and hours and order status, for starters – you can release the pressure on your live agents and keep them fresh and focused for more complicated calls that do require a human touch. In doing so, you'll keep expenditures under control and also provide your organization with a true competitive edge.
Delivered as an on-demand solution, modern IVR functionality can provide contact centers with all the benefits and features of premise-based solutions, but require little up-front capital investment, can be up and running the same day and can be maintained by someone else, eliminating the necessity of keeping a team of IT specialists and troubleshooters in-house. Contact centers can ensure consistent operations across both the IVR and the ACD: a link that is a traditional pain point for many organizations.
Gone are the days when you needed to have a degree in IT and a decade's worth of equipment experience to maintain an IVR. Solutions such as that from Five9 (News - Alert) Inc. include an easy-to-use IVR script designer. Essentially, contact center administrators can easily design and then define the customer experience for all calls as they are guided through IVR menus and prompts, into ACD queues and skill groups, and delivered to agents. Contact centers also have the flexibility to upload custom prompts and hold music to fine-tune the IVR caller’s experience and enhance the organization's brand.
With support for DTMF, text-to-speech and speech recognition, contact centers can offer self-service applications that help reduce staffing costs by automating the handling of more phone calls. With the ability to use Web services to retrieve data from external systems and databases, today's newer IVR applications can provide more data to callers, gather more information about the callers to make routing decisions, or even update external systems with call-related data. Callers generally prefer the voice input: it's generally faster, easier and can be done from a mobile phone while driving, for example.
With the advances in speech recognition combined with the features and functionality of an on-demand solution, the contact center IVR need no longer be a source of pain for anyone: customers, agents or management. If this keeps up, you might actually start to like your IVR.
For more information about Five9's on-demand IVR solution, visit www.five9.com.
Tracey Schelmetic is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Tracey's articles, please visit her columnist page.
Edited by Jennifer Russell
