At a trade show several years ago, I spotted a vendor that had an old-fashioned IVR (interactive voice response) "beige box" in their booth. It was a source of curiosity and intense attraction for two reasons: first, because it was laughably primitive-looking. Second, and perhaps more important, because it had been turned into a beer keg.
This is a good use for a legacy IVR.
Other suggestions might include door stops, large paper weights, booster chairs for small children at dinnertime, boat anchors and for-show-only props inside IT rooms that used to be crammed with noisy servers but are now empty because companies use all hosted solutions and no longer need either servers or an army of IT administrators, but the COO wants to keep the space from being taken over by the marketing department to hold sensitivity training seminars.
Increasingly, IVRs aren't really a "thing" anymore and are now more of a service. Hosted IVR service providers can turn a company's IVR on and change and configure it to match an organization's needs almost in an instant. (Making changes to traditional IVRs menus used to be a task that ranked about five steps below "getting a root canal without anesthesia" on the "things I'd like to do this afternoon" task list.)
Some of today's hosted IVR solutions are actually more like toolkits…they allow companies to basically build their own IVRs using point-and-click, and make changes to them in the same way.
Whoda thunk that building IVR menu trees could almost be…dare one say it…fun?
Because of this newfound flexibility, the humble IVR, once used by very large companies to get customers off the phone as quickly as possible regardless of the ultimate ramifications ("Welcome to Acme Airlines. Press one to be cut off, press two to be put on hold for up to nine hours, press three to hear services in a language you don't understand, press four to leave a message in a mailbox that hasn't been checked since acid-washed jeans were in style, and press five if you've finally faced reality and realize we won't let you speak with a human under any circumstances whatsoever"), has organically sprouted a whole host of new capabilities and applications. IVRs are being used by organizations that not only never imagined they could afford to buy and administer an IVR, but never imagined they would have a need for one.
"IVR" and "call routing" used to be synonymous. That's all the IVR did…attempt to take a call and do a little pre-qualification on it so the organization could get some idea where to send it for processing. The information input by the customer into the IVR was never carried with the call, which is why the incredibly annoying need arose to verbally repeat your account number to an agent even after you'd just spend 10 minutes punching your 57-digit account number into your phone's key pad. (This is generally reported as the top peeve consumers have with IVR.)
Medical/Scientific Research
Imagine you're conducting a study on blood pressure medication. You have 5,000 patients enrolled in the study. Every day, each of those patients is required to measure his or her blood pressure and report the stats to you. Because a large portion of the patient pool is elderly, using the Internet really isn't an option. You used to use live agents to take the calls, but you discovered this took too much time: in addition to reporting the numbers, your patients were a chatty bunch: "Well, the blood pressure is a little high today, but my grandchildren came over yesterday and we ate rocky road ice cream together, and then I took them for a walk and got over-tired, so maybe the pressure would be lower if…" After taking 500 of these calls, your agents are ready for mental health disability services. Voice mail would be equally ineffective; leaving an "open forum" for patients to ramble would still waste a great deal of time, and someone would still have to listen to those messages. IVR, on the other hand, can force the patients into entering only the pertinent information: "Using your phone's key pad, please enter your patient number now. Thank you. Please enter your systolic number now. Thank you. Please enter your diastolic number now. Thank you. Good-bye." Additionally, rather than rely on patients to call in every day, the IVR can initiate the outbound calls to the patients, resulting in a higher rate of compliance with the study.
Medical researchers also report that they love IVR for research because patients view it as non-judgmental. If the study is about, for instance, alcohol or drug use or sensitive or personal medical information, many patients are far less likely to lie to an IVR than a human they feel might "judge" them.
Outbound Alerting
Remember when IVR was only inbound? No more. Your package has arrived. Your flight is delayed. Your doctor's appointment is tomorrow at 2:00 pm. Your bank account is overdrawn. Your car payment is due. Your kid didn't show up to school today and was instead found spray painting the words "Calculus Sucks" on the principal's 50-foot yacht. Hosted IVR solutions can be easily configured to deliver these types of alerts to your home phone, your cell phone via voice or text and even your e-mail.
Customer Service Satisfaction Surveys
Once upon a time, customer satisfaction surveys were conducted (when they were conducted at all) so far after the customer interaction that the information gleaned was nearly meaningless. It also needed to be processed and analyzed by humans. The results certainly didn't tell a company what they were doing wrong — only what they'd done wrong.
Sure, companies were able to do customer surveys with traditional, premise-based IVR. But of course, making changes on-the-fly to the system was so cumbersome (see aforementioned root canal analogy), surveying in this way very likely cost more than it gained.
Today's hosted IVR services, on the other hand, can be altered, added to or swapped out completely as a company's needs change. New product rollout? Not a problem. Another team of agents added to the call center? Also not a problem. An unexpected event? A temporary sales promotion? Surveys can be customized, targeted and brought online for only as long as they are needed.
Such IVR-based surveys can either be inbound (the system asks an inbound customer, at the close of the contact, if he/she is willing to take a survey; if the answer is yes, the customer is transferred into the survey) or outbound (the customer completes a transaction and is contacted by the IVR the next day to complete a survey). Today's systems are also "smart" enough to be pre-configured to offer a customer a survey under a given set of criteria. A company might determine it wants customers to be offered the survey if, for instance, he or she was on hold for a long time, was transferred more than x number of times or mentioned a competitor's name during the course of the call.
You'll recall that earlier customer feedback surveys done by legacy IVR relied on the agent to manually transfer the call into the survey system. Since few agents would transfer a call that had not gone well into a feedback survey, the results gained from such manual agent transfer were based in reality about as much as "Baywatch" plots.
Cyclical Business Changes
How big did your premise-based IVR system need to be in the olden days? As big as it was ever going to get, of course. Such systems could only "scale down" and leave unused capacity on the shelf for when it was needed: holidays, natural disasters or other peak call times. You bought the maximum capacity you thought you would ever use (and don't even THINK about what would have happened if you'd suddenly needed more), and 99 percent of the time, that excess capacity gathered virtual (and probably literal) dust. Hosted IVR solutions can scale up and down quickly as needs change, which means companies pay for only what they use.
Host Your IVR On Your Web Site
How about this for the pièce de résistance? Hosted IVR solutions allow you to put a button on your Web site that lets customers make IVR-type choices and initiate calls to you — through your Web site.
Many people turned to hosted IVR solutions because they needed the technology but didn't have the capital to lay out upfront. What they ended up getting was many times more capabilities and value for a fraction of the cost.
The only downside? You won't have the raw materials to make a do-it-yourself beer keg in the future.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) | X |
A hardware- or software-based computer system that enables incoming callers to interact with voice prompts or verbal commands....more |