Adaptive IVR Blog

As you close out the calendar year, catch up with these top articles and videos.

The calendar year may be coming to a close, but customer service is only picking up for many of us.

So what does that mean for you? Has your customer service been naughty or nice this year? And next year, are you planning to be on the” good list” or the “very, very good list?” (Hey, if there was a “very, very good list,” you sure would target it, wouldn’t you?)

One thing’s for sure, we are absolutely committed to helping you stay at the top of the “very, very good list,” and look forward to supporting your business in the future.

As we see played out in most enterprise contact centers – most technologies are decentralized, unintegrated and lacking common goals.

The challenges for you as contact center leaders and front-line managers are to deliver an optimal customer experience that satisfies the customer, while maximizing the value of your operational teams, processes and infrastructure. These conflicting yet equally critical priorities compound the already complex role you have to create a smoothly executed, cost-savings operation that solves your customers’ needs in the ways they wish and need to be served.

So what does this mean for your enterprise? How can technology vendors become true partners to maximize the pulse of your contact center?

When you think about your interactive voice response (IVR), leaks may not come to mind. You are probably more concerned about costs, the customer experience (CX), and system efficiency and uptime. But make no mistake, IVRs may develop leaks just like your pipes – and these steady drips can affect cost, CX, efficiency and more. 

Customer experience, as we all know it, is either good or bad – there are no gray areas when we need help and quickly formulate an impression of our experience. That’s why securing the customer experience (CX) is critical at the first touchpoint a customer has with you.

Bad CX, everyone has experienced it. You call a company and encounter an IVR. You may need to enter your customer information to take any next steps. If you can’t solve the problem on your own, a live agent picks up and asks you who you are all over again. You think, “Why did I waste time entering a 37-digit number or even bother trying to do this myself?” It’s enough to try the Dalai Lama’s patience.

Encounters with contact centers frequently fall short of the ideal. All too often, people are frustrated by long wait times and transfers to multiple representatives (who ask for the same information all over again). A poor customer experience (CX) can have serious ramifications. Negative opinions – expressed via social media or word of mouth – can impact your organization’s effectiveness in delivering needed services, and even its public reputation. 

Adaptive technology frees professionals to do their jobs. Case workers, law enforcement officers, and many other State agency professionals are being distracted from their primary roles by administrative chores associated with contact center inquiries. And government operations are not alone – commercial enterprises face the same productivity challenges. 

The main culprit? Manual processes such as intake, review and routing of phone calls, and web-based queries or submissions.

To achieve the state of the art in contact centers, government and commercial organizations must look beyond the traditional model: reliance on the phone and live agents; on-premises infrastructure; distributed, siloed applications, data sources and security; and cumbersome manual processes.

A multi-faceted approach can benefit government and business alike

Neither customers nor an organization’s representatives wish to be at the receiving end of a bad customer care experience.  Customers, myself included, dread the level of effort it takes to handle certain customer care issues that should be relatively easy to resolve. In fact, my husband and I will duke it out (okay, maybe it’s more of a rock-paper-scissors effort) to see which one of us “loses” and gets to call the cable/internet/any company when we have outages or questions. 

He wants attention, love, care, and engagement – just like us!

Mohawk has been part of my family for 4 years. He's loving and affectionate and so well-mannered. Plus he's a cutie!  This little guy has taught my family new things about caring and paying attention to who and what is right in front of you. Plus we've had to learn accommodations to our schedules and lifestyle. So let's just agree, Mohawk is a guru on relationship development and CX.