Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems don’t have the greatest reputation. They have caused concerns for both callers and companies in the past due to problems like having to repeat information and being mis-routed. Now however, thanks to new technologies, IVRs are actually doing the opposite: They are helping companies to lower costs and even improve customer satisfaction rates.

All of the ways a good voice application can offer a competitive advantage were outlined during a recent Webinar.  “Reinventing your IVR to control costs and delight customers” sponsored by  Spoken, covered IVR trends, best practices for implementation and automation and even offered a closer look at a case study.

Jeff Dworkin,  Principal Consultant at Ghostpoint Consulting gave attendees  a look back at the evolution of the IVR, its purpose, and how it has evolved to the successful systems we use today.

Starting in the 60s, Jeff noted, as these early systems were being built, many thought natural language interfaces for IVR would be impossible to achieve. But by the early 80s we had things like audio text boxes that had recordings for callers that then became voice response units which held prompts and information using snippets of prerecorded speech.

Later on in the 90s, interactive voice response entered the scene and it was all about information retrieval in real- time.

Fast forward o the late 2000’s and we had continuous and natural language interfaces and better computing power as well as VXML, that brought us to the place we are now.

IVRs today can help with automation and can be used reduce costs -  part of the original motivation to for IVRs.  This has all become possible thanks to well design technology combined with a good customer service rep.

These two must go hand-in-hand. An over reliance on solutions to work as a stand alone created many of the problems we have heard about over and over again with customer service.

To combat this, a hybrid approach increases ROI and satisfaction. And that’s where Spoken Communications (News - Alert) is positioned. This combination of human with technology is like a safety net, Charlie Anderson President of, Voice Discovery Services explained during the webinar.

Spoken SMART IVR uses a ‘Silent Guide’ to help monitor and assist with the success of live calls.   Having a live person able to help the system means superior accuracy and the smoothest customer experience possible.

Jeff Gove, Vice President of Customer Care Operations at The Neat Company also joined the call to talk about how leveraging Spoken’s solution made it possible for the company to meet challenges and goals.