Adaptive IVR Blog

The IVR has evolved over time. Once considered just a routing technology that worked in conjunction with the ACD to get calls to the right place and eliminate the need for humans to act as gatekeepers for all calls, it has slowly evolved to be an end-to-end solution for customer self-service.

The Evolutionary Timeline

The IVR was born in 1962 when the Bell System first introduced tone dialing. During the 1970s and 1980s, call centers rushed to implement commercial IVRs, which simply detected input from the customer and routed the call to a specific department. These solutions were simply auto-attendants that took the place of a human operator for call routing.

There is no “one size fits all” when it comes to your customers. Not everyone who walks into Starbucks wants the same thing. These customers expect a customized beverage based on their personal preferences, and if they don't get it, they probably will head to Dunkin' Donuts.

Customer support technology shouldn’t attempt to be one size fits all either. Customers are increasingly coming to expect more personalized service, not only from brick and mortar establishments, but from call centers and automated systems. Thanks to the skillful manipulation of data coupled with analytics, personalization is possible.

Whether you’re thinking about moving your premise IVR to the cloud or changing to a new cloud IVR vendor, pricing will factor into your purchase decision. 

Much is written about how the cloud allows you to shift dollars from capex to opex, so we thought it might be helpful to share some details about how cloud IVR vendors typically structure those expenses.

In some programs, up to 98 percent of customer calls into a contact center are automated in the IVR for our customers. IVR is still highly critical to overall customer experience (CX), and may be the main source of experience with a brand.

Having access to the right data and knowing how to apply it to personalize your IVR can be the difference between winning and losing business. In today’s fast-moving, hypercompetitive world, customers want to be treated as unique individuals and expect companies they do business with to know them, and anything less is a bad experience.