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.

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. 

We’ve all heard the buzz about personalized IVR self-service and how it takes the cost out of contact center operations. But, it can also put revenue goals over the top as well by improving agent productivity.

You'll get more productivity out of your existing agents, and it will enable your contact center to scale up call volume without adding more agents to the mix.

Hurricane Sandy hit the east coast with fury in October 2012. As the massive storm moved ashore, large technology companies around the country began experiencing major outages due to the brutal weather. For call centers caught off guard, it meant valuable communications were being delayed or not sent at all. It also meant a complete breakdown in communication with consumers at a time when it was of the utmost importance.

Customer experience in the IVR is like anything else- what gets measured gets done.  Post-call surveys certainly help gather caller perception of the IVR experience, but perception doesn't tell the whole story. Unfortunately, legacy IVR systems don't always provide the data you need to get a more comprehensive picture.  Let's take a deeper look at the challenge.

So, what do you use to measure a customer’s experience through an IVR?  How do you know that they got what they wanted?  The answer to this question is actually straight-forward – you just have to focus on the customer.  Each customer has a goal when using the IVR application and has feelings about the way the IVR helped them complete that goal.  Contact Solutions has developed a CXR system based on the following focus areas:

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.

It’s not far-fetched to say that the contact center is the single most critical operation in any company. If a company has a poor relationship with its customers, its other operations might as well cease to exist. The contact center is the place where the company and its customers meet. Whether this place is a battlefield (hello, Comcast!) or a collaborative and productive environment is a choice every company makes, and it usually starts with one person.

The VP of Operations is usually the contact center’s biggest decision maker. In most medium-sized and large enterprises, this is the person who crafts strategies for people, processes and technology and sets the tone for an organization’s relationship with its customers. It’s therefore critical that this individual understand people: both a company’s customer support personnel and customers themselves.

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.

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.