IVR systems have been reliably reducing cost in the contact center for over 2 decades now. Yet, IVR has not exactly been a driver of engaging, productive, and pleasing customer experiences. Why? It’s in the design. You can have the best IVR platform in the world – if you’re not designing the IVR experience around your customers, you’re not going to get much love for what really is still the front door to your customer’s experience.
But fixing the design is possible and you don’t need expensive speech technology to dramatically improve your self-service customer experience. Compare the following two call experiences with ABC Cast, an Internet and telephony service provider:
1) Deploying expensive speech technology
IVR: “Hello and welcome to ABC Cast. This is an automated voice response system. You can speak your answers freely at any time. So tell me: how can I help you?”
Caller: “I have a question about my modem”
IVR: “I understand you’re calling about your modem. Do you need to speak to someone from our…”
– Call accidentally gets disconnected. You decide to call back –
IVR: “Hello and welcome to ABC Cast. This is an automated voice response system. You can speak your answers freely at any time. So tell me: how can I help you?”
Caller: “I have a question about my modem”
IVR: “I understand you’re calling about modems. Do you need to speak to someone from our sales, or service department?”
Caller: “Service”
IVR: “Not a problem! Please stand by as we’re connecting you to our service department…”
2) Being smart about user-centric design and context awareness
IVR: “Hello, and welcome to ABC Cast. I just ran a quick diagnostic on your connection, and it seems like you’re experiencing slow Internet connectivity. Would you like…”
– Call accidentally gets disconnected and before the customer redials, ABC Cast calls back –
IVR: “Hi, this is ABC Cast calling. We were just talking about your connectivity issue. It seems like you’re experiencing slow Internet connectivity. Would you like to speak to a service representative about this?”
Caller: “Yes!”
Notice the difference? In the second scenario, when the customer called back after getting disconnected, ABC Cast already knew about the caller’s issue before they said a thing. And it even called them back after a disconnect. At Aspect, we call this Context Continuity and Caller Intent Prediction.
These are just two of the seven key capabilities that you should explore for a Modern IVR. Curious what the others are? Have a look at this video that introduces you to Modern IVR:
And if you want to learn even more, have a look at www.aspect.com/IVR
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