Adaptive IVR Blog

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. 

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?

Customer Service is no longer just about answering the phone; it’s about being responsive to voice, social media, messaging, video, email, digital web and mobile.

Addressing today’s digital consumer-centric environment is now table-stakes and your Contact Center technology has to step up and keep pace.  Working with clients struggling with outdated telecom and contact center infrastructure while others seize market advantage by embracing advanced multi-channel integrated cloud platform solutions is an eye-opening experience.  The conclusion is clear.  There’s only one-way to go.  That’s forward – and fast.

Perhaps you remember the refrain from the popular sitcom, “Cheers,” “Sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name.” Everyone wants to be treated as an individual.   And now big companies also are trying to make you feel like someone special.  Even McDonald’s, which owes its decades of success to conformity, is testing a create-your-taste menu.

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. 

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.

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.

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.