IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems can enhance the customer experience for any company, according to a new report, “Improving Customer Experience with IVR,” which was released by DMG Consulting, in partnership with Connect First.
The report discusses the new generation of IVR solutions coming to market with vastly enhanced technical environments that address the needs of today’s contact centers.
IVRs remain essential and powerful tools for contact centers, whether they handle 30% or 95% of all incoming transactions, the report notes. When used on an outbound basis, they have also become an essential component and driver of multichannel customer engagement strategies, which are proving to be highly effective.
When IVRs were introduced to the market, the report says, the plan was to make a substantial one-time investment in the platform and script/VUI, and then operate it “as is” for years. It quickly became clear that this was not an ideal approach, but companies wanted to get a payback from their initial IVR investments before even considering IVR enhancements.
Now, according to the report, the cloud is changing this equation. Cloud-based IVR vendors have needed to become more flexible to win business, and they’ve gotten creative with their offerings. Early on, these vendors were willing to absorb some of the IVR development costs to win business from premise-based competitors. Now they are aggressively competing with each other, and to reduce their operating costs, they are delivering much-needed innovation to the market, primarily by giving business managers the tools to control their own IVR destiny.
“Interactive voice response systems (IVRs)–love them or hate them, you need them,” the report says. “The top issue with IVR systems today, from the customer perspective, is that the user interfaces are cumbersome, time-consuming and infuriating. This has been the number-one problem with IVRs for so long that either companies are not listening to their customers’ complaints, or there is another reason why they are not investing to improve them.”
For some companies, the report notes, it may be because they are not customer-centric and use IVR as a way to reduce access to live (and expensive) agents, while others do not have the IT budget, knowledge or resources to make the necessary investments. This reflects a technology challenge. Most organizations do not know how to identify where customers are having trouble in their IVRs. And even if they can identify the pain points, they don’t know how to modify their IVR programs, scripts and voice user interfaces.
“It’s taken too long–over 20 years–but some IVR vendors have finally figured out that they can improve usability and, ultimately, the customer experience, by enhancing their platforms, analytics, and development tools,” the report says. “There is a new generation of IVR solutions coming to market with vastly enhanced technical environments that address the needs of today’s contact centers. These enhanced IVR solutions accommodate the requirement for continuous change and improvement.”
What’s striking about these improvements, the report points out, is that they are geared toward business users and not IT, as IVR vendors now appreciate that it’s contact center managers and supervisors who are responsible for managing these solutions on a day-to-day basis, particularly if they are in the cloud.