Adaptive IVR Blog

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

Never underestimate the power of recurring cost savings.  Even tiny improvements to contact center operations may seem deceptively small, but will save you big in the long run.

For example, our continuous improvement practice recently recommended a change to a client’s IVR system that will result in an automation rate increase of a fraction of one percent.  The higher automation rate will save the client about $4000 a month by reducing transfers to agents.  On the scale of operating a large contact center, $4000 in savings sounds like a drop in the bucket.

Dr. Natalie Petouhoff of Constellation Research recently wrote a blog post about Verint’s Acquisition of Contact Solutions.  These are the insights she offered:

Cloud-Based Customer Service and Customer Experience

Verint^® Systems Inc. announced its acquisition of Contact Solutions, a leading provider of real-time, contextual customer care solutions. The combination of Contact Solutions advances the Verint Customer Engagement Optimization^™ portfolio with the addition of cloud-based solutions that enhance voice and mobile self-service through automation and analytics-driven personalization. 

Today, we’re pleased to announce Verint’s acquisition of Contact Solutions, a leading provider of cloud-based voice and mobile customer care solutions.  

Most enterprises treat their Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system like a family car.  When you bring it home for the first time, it feels like it’s perfect.  It sparkles like a diamond, there’s not a scratch on it, the engine purrs like a kitten and it’s even got that new car smell. 

It can last a reasonably long time if you maintain it properly, but most people just change the oil and the tires when absolutely necessary.  And while it grows comfortable and familiar, you never expect it to get any better than the day you bought it.

Deploying and maintaining a CRM system is a big deal, especially when you consider the surrounding business processes and employee effort necessary to make CRM a business success. Without proof of success, executive support for the CRM initiative will wane, participation and progress will slow down, and success will be increasingly difficult to achieve. 

As you endeavor to create a holistic view of your customer interactions, are you, like many enterprises, forgetting to include detailed interaction data from one of the highest-volume customer interaction points in the company?

It’s no surprise that customer data security is on everyone’s mind.  It should be. 

While enterprise business solution customers tend to be more savvy, there is still a need to underscore the security of these solutions.  

No one wants to be the company that lets personal data get into the wrong hands.

While agents in the contact center are often the target of "social engineering" attempts by fraudsters to gain access to sensitive customer information, it turns out that the agents aren't the only target. 

The skeptics say that customer service is an oxymoron…that great service is a lost art.  But in today’s highly competitive economy, we all know it’s critical to an organization’s success. The question is this: Are you making the right moves to differentiate your brand with great customer service?

Consider some data points:

Forget optimization and fine-tuning: many organizations today are failing on very baseline issues of design fundamentals.

Despite the importance of the IVR to a company’s overall customer support strategy – a Purdue University study conducted several years back found that 63 percent of customers stop interacting with a company after a bad IVR experience – many companies are still making egregious mistakes in their IVR design.