Interactive voice response (IVR) doesn’t have a great reputation. In fact, it’s one of those technologies most likely to be the butt of jokes and parodies. Older IVR technology, which was ponderous, expensive, hard to change and frustrating for customers certainly deserved that reputation. Customers were more likely to zero out to an agent than willingly interact with the IVR.
Times have changed. The IVR today is nimbler, easier to customized and administer and more relevant to a company’s business. It’s the crown-jewel in most contact center’s self-service strategies, and customers don’t seem to hate it nearly as much as they used to.”
“Studies of customer behavior have shown that the IVR is no longer shunned like it used to be,” wrote Voice & Data’s Balaka Baruah Aggarwal several years ago. Customers, once very likely to choose the option for an operator before the IVR menu even finished, are more likely today to use the IVR as it was designed, by pressing the number (or speaking the phrase) for the desired department. In fact, wrote Aggarwal, customers today are more likely to want to avoid speaking with a live agent. There are studies to back this up, indicating that many customers have a preference for automation over live agents.
It may be because we’re more used to self-service today, but it’s more likely because of the changes that have been wrought in IVR technology. The IVR, once a box that sat in a company’s IT room and was difficult to configure, is now more likely to be a Web-delivered service that can be configured by anyone capable of pointing and clicking. Years of best practices in menu tree design have yielded better scripts and discouraged companies from getting overly complex with their IVRs. Problems can be fixed literally on-the-fly if a certain menu tree configuration is found to be ineffective.
Speech technology has also gone a long way toward civilizing the IVR. Customers are able to speak their requests, or even use natural language, to direct their calls. The result is that to customers, the speech-enabled IVR “feels” less like an IVR than it does a virtual auto-attendant. Speech is even more critical as the penetration of mobile devices increases: tapping “1” or “2” on a tiny screen becomes cumbersome, and even dangerous if the customer is driving.
Essentially, the IVR has ceased to be a torture device and is today approaching something that actually helps customers. Just ensure that you’re not using your IVR as a shield to keep customers away from you, but instead as a helpful technology that helps improve the customer relationship.