Hosted IVR Solutions Boost Customer Self-Service Rates and Remove Technical Barriers
May 08, 2013
By Tracey E. Schelmetic, TMCnet Contributor
It’s no secret that customers are not – and have never been – big fans of traditional interactive voice response (IVR) technology. While there’s nothing wrong with the technology itself, the problem often lies in how these systems are designed. It’s easy to go wrong, and add too many layers, leading to frustrated customers who feel they just can’t get past the IVR to the resources they need.
Speech technology has helped cure some of these frustrations, according to Stefan Captijn, product marketing manager, EMEA at Genesys.
“Speech-based systems are more flexible and diverse than DTMF, but to make them effective you have to ensure they directly address the needs of your customers,” he said. “The trap that many businesses fell in to with DTMF – which can be highly effective – was in the design stage. Those who automated everything ended up with a service that customers became frustrated with and didn’t use.”
The result was customers “zeroing” out before they finished interacting with the IVR in an attempt to skip the headache. Speech, on the other hand, can create a more natural interface, allowing the customer to interact with the system in the most natural way possible: by speaking. This can decrease the number of customers who zero out, boosting usage rates of self-service and saving the contact center time and money. Captijn presents a number of tips to help design a speech-based IVR system that appeals to customers, allowing it to become a useful tool and not a 21st century torture method. These include pursuing open standards rather than closed systems for more flexibility, measuring the benefits and reviewing the systems’ successes and adjusting accordingly, and changing the IVR as business changes to better meet both the needs of the company and the customer.
Building IVR menu trees was once the provenance of the IT department, since earlier generations of IVR required significant technical knowledge. Once the systems were built, they were difficult to change and often remained static, doing nothing for the business’ changing needs. Hosted IVR solutions such as those from hosted contact center solutions provider Nimblevox can go a long way toward eliminating these problems.
IVRs today, when delivered via the cloud, are more a matter of drag-and-drop design that can be accomplished by call center workers with no IT degrees. Instant IVR application creation and set up with service creation tools mean the IVR can be changed to suit the company on a daily basis, and applications can be deployed from anywhere on the network at the touch of a button. With the addition of advanced features such as text to speech, automatic speech recognition, DTMF recognition and answering machine detection, even small contact centers can build precisely the type of IVR they need to boost their self-service rates while keeping customer satisfaction high.
Edited by Rachel Ramsey