Adaptive IVR Blog

GenZ, or Post-Millennial, consumers are the last demographic group you would expect to make a phone call for customer service. These teens and young adults want quick and easy solutions to their issues and prefer to use digital channels for them. They are impatient and will shortly make up the majority of our future customer target base. So what’s a contact center to do if they are lagging behind digital transformation and rely on phone customer service to help their customers?

During South Florida’s Take Your Child to Work Day today, I approached this topic with my inhouse GenZ expert, my son Nicolas, and here’s what he had to say.

Research shows that cost control is the #1 goal for contact center operations executives, followed closely by delivery of a positive CX. 

But here’s a dirty little secret: in many contact centers, those two objectives are diametrically opposed.

• Cutting budget (fewer agents, inadequate technology) to meet business mandates can have a negative impact on customer experience (CX) and staff metrics.
• Improving CX might require investing $ in processes, systems, tools, and products to improve customer service which may increase the budget initially.

Both of these issues require you to walk the tightrope between controlling your budget and delivering a satisfying CX. Successfully reconciling these two ostensibly conflicting goals is a balancing act that contact center execs can win. Let’s explore how to turn confrontation into collaboration with your workforce optimization (WFO) and interactive voice response (IVR).

Are you lying awake worrying about your contact center’s operations and more? Many executives experience constant anxiety from trying to juggle competing priorities. Time is precious and you don’t have enough of it to do more – you need solutions to ease your burden, not add to it.

What if you could make some simple modifications to turn that insomnia into a peaceful night's sleep?

Workforce Optimization (WFO) is a cornerstone of contact center operations.  When you need to see the landscape of agent performance, WFO is the paint-by-number kit you count on to help maximize agent productivity and customer satisfaction. 

But your contact center could have a festering problem. What if it’s missing a few colors and paints only part of the picture you need? 

Unless you’re a contact center Picasso, missing part of the picture could put a real limit on your ability to optimize. 

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.

When have you had the opportunity to delve deeper into contact center data mining, and in particular in the customer self-service channel? This is historically a “set it and forget it” channel, which means there’s a whole source of actionable analytics that you may be missing out on.

We get it, no one can be accused of being Superman in the contact center - seeing through the data, tools and technology in the blink of the eye to the core actionable answers. That would be great, but it’s not reality.

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?

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.  

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.