The Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system with modernised calling technology has become key in the development and advancement of businesses across platforms.
Allowing a
caller to resolve their issues without having the need to directly talk to an
agent saves the company’s time and cost.
However, an entire system of IVR service or analytics involves multiple IVR
prompts that often make the solution appear quite taxing for most customers.
At a time, when the world has seen enough of AI (artificial intelligence)-based
voice assistant systems and chatbots, where the gap between machines and humans
are constantly being bridged, it’s probably time for IVR services to integrate
such AI-based communication into their system.
The key to making the IVR system more customer-friendly and advanced is with a
Bot handling the end-to-end communication and eliminating unnecessary manual
activities. This will help save time and hold the customer’s interest.
And this can easily be achieved by roping in cloud services provided by Alexa,
Google Assistant, and other voice assistant services.
How To Begin?
To start with, it’s not an easy process. If you thought that just paying more to upgrade your platform would fetch a company the required technology to support a premium voice recognition system, it’s not really so.While getting the technology is the easy part, building a smart and intelligent IVR system that could be at par with services including Alexa and Google Assistant needs multiple considerations.
Perhaps, a bit of learning and research along these lines would help a company customise the Bot management in their own way to turn an end-to-end IVR system into a successful voice-based communication system.
We go step-by-step. To make a successful voice-assistant-based IVR call, let’s know how Amazon and Google came up with their VA and chatbots.
Having spent years into research and following up on trends, the two big tech giants came up with their VA analytics. However, they did not just bring in technology but developed their bot system in accordance with the need of their users.
So one of the basic key secrets to making your IVR system work at par with top-grade voice assistant systems would be to first bring in a bot management system that will work according to the needs of your customer base. If needed, only then one must switch platforms as and when your bot strategy demands it.
What Benefits Would Voice Recognition Systems Add To The IVR Call?
A well-built IVR service can empower a company’s customer services by making it easy for the callers to navigate through a series of IVR numbers and have their issues resolved. Now imagine, replacing the IVR numbers with an AI-based voice recognition system that would also make it appear like a human-to-human conversation.With an IVR, customers often need to provide a lot of information that the customer might not recall or even be aware of.
A human-to-human talk, in such a case, becomes easier for a customer to directly have their issues communicated without going through a series of IVF numbers, which may also leave a customer wondering whether their issues would be resolved at all.
Following How Alexa and Google Assistant Work, One Thing To Keep in Mind Would Be ‘What Do Your Users Want?’
The way these voice recognition technologies have used their data to analyse what their customers are looking for is the same way it could be embedded in IVR analytics.First is Natural Language Understanding (NLU) which recognises speech utterances in a way that is faster and smoother. With NLU, this voice-assistantship technology almost makes it a human-like conversation.
When we
talk to our smart speakers, it often feels like we are talking to a human,
where we club multiple pieces of information into a single sentence and put
them together. It’s understood and responses are reverted at a go.
For example, if we ask, “Where is a mobile store in CR Park to service my
phone?”
If we break this sentence down, we have three ‘slots’—place, action, location.
An NLU system comes up with a technology of ‘slot filing’ that helps a voice
assistant system to understand and process the information faster with many
data put together at once.
If we consider the same to be communicated with an IVR system, the IVR solution
would require us to dial multiple prompts to give us an answer; here it may be
three IVR numbers for three different slots.
Second, relevance.
One might wonder, why relevance? With Google Assistants or Siri or Alexa,
information stored and access is up-to-date. When a question is asked, there
are not too many follow-ups with the consumer concerned.
For example, “Hey Google, when is my train departing tomorrow?” In this case,
your Google Assistant already has pre-loaded information from your calendar and
would not ask you a bunch of unnecessary follow-up questions.
However, when it comes to an IVR call, consumer-centric information stored
should be integrated with the IVR service provider, so that consumers are
spared from going through a series of unrequired prompts.
Just as voice assistants are linked to the web, IVR service should also be
linked with internal systems at their individual companies, through which they
can retract previous records and information for the concerned caller.
These are a couple of examples that may help us understand that at a time, when
technology is upgrading itself in leaps and bounds, old-school IVR calls should
slowly bring in similar analytics to enhance their communication system.
Third, the number of skills to offer.
How many skills can IVR analytics offer as compared to Google Assistant and
Alexa? By skills, we mean, the abilities of these voice-based chatbots to let
us know about today’s weather, our flight’s status, our upcoming appointments,
the nearest store of some services, and so on.
When it comes to an IVR solution, how many skills are there for an IVR call to
offer? Often after entering a series of prompts, one has to keep hitting 0 to
go back to the main contact platform to restart again. And that can be taxing.
Start Thinking Into The Future
According to research by VoxGen, 51% of consumers would be likely or very likely to use their voice assistants for sales and customer service purposes if the organisation they were engaged with provided that option.The report stated that with AI playing a bigger role in our daily lives than ever before, this opportunity shouldn’t be missed.
Bringing in the right chatbots is the need of the hour to manage your IVR analytics; it is time to upgrade your IVR call service to create a comfortable, easy-to-use experience.
Why Is There A Need To Upgrade Your IVR System To Alexa or Google Assistant-Like Chatbots?
According to a survey by the New York University, it was found that 83 percent of customers have reported that IVRs hardly provide any solution to issues, and it often becomes meaningless to enter a series of prompts, without having the complaints resolved.In addition to entering information, often companies play their marketing and promotion messages that may often cause long delays and waiting times.
Conclusion
As it is, with a rise in the use of IVR systems across businesses, a customer is often compelled to use the automation way, and with more and more companies embracing the IVR, customers are left with very limited options of choosing to directly speak with an associate.Companies should understand that IVR systems should cater to the services of a customer in a clear, concise, and quick way, rather than focussing on the cost-effectivity of the business.
According to multiple reports, it has often been discovered that tech developers behind most customer service IVR systems have not been investing time into the research community of speech recognition, in the same way as developers of tech giants of Google and Amazon do.
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