Adaptive IVR Blog

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  Working with clients struggling with outdated telecom and contact center infrastructure while others seize market advantage by embracing advanced multi-channel integrated cloud platform solutions is an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.

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?

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.

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.

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.