2 min readIVR Trend IVR as Intelligent Call Router

As Internet becomes more ubiquitous every day, including on telephones with the rise of mobile internet and smartphones, self-services transactions are moving from the IVRs to the Web. Now, when customers call your business, their primary goal is to talk to one of your customer service representative (CSR).

A new generation of IVR voice applications is becoming more and more popular, in particular as hosted IVR solutions for multiple-sites entreprises and large corporation working with different call centers outsourcers.

The purpose of these voice applications is to automate only the beginning of the call with CSRs.

These voice applications have almost the same structure in 3 steps  :

1. A welcome message then information and/or exception messages
2. No more than 4 Voice Dialogs to qualify who the caller is and what is the reason for the call
3. Intelligent Call Routing to reach a skilled CSR

I will decribe in details what can be done on each step in future posts but keep in mind that the caller experience and the efficiency of the call automation can be significantly improved with various features of modern IVR systems like, among others:

• Automatic Caller Recognition,
• CRM integration,
• Personalized Interactions
• Speech Recognition Dialogs,
• CTI data passed to the call centers and so on.

We have closely with our partners and different big corporations like banks, insurance groups, airlines or railways companies, large retailers, energy utility companies to validate the ROI on more than 100 millions of calls.

The ROI of such a solution is pretty simple to calculate : compare the time spent in the IVR and assume that the same amount of time would be spent with a CSR to give the same inputs (e.g, VIP code, category of problem, etc).

The IVR solution has a positive ROI when, for a equal period of time,  average fully-loaded cost of a CSR > overall cost of  the IVR solution including development & hosting.

In conclusion, an IVR solution as Intelligent Call Router is a good money saver for large and mid-sized corporations without frustrating their customers with full self-service IVRs with endless dialogs that do not meet their need when calling you.

Thanks to John Davey, Manjuiv Katta, Rohit Chendke, Kevin C Brown for their inputs.