As Contact Center professionals we know that the core drivers of any business are: customer acquisition, customer retention and customer development. Aligning the business to these drivers opens up a large number of opportunities with prospective consumers, who may need a solution which could eventually represent the face of your organization. From another perspective, it also opens up a large number of newer solutions that consumers may be looking at.
Contact Centers have easily been the traditional stars for customer service solutions. However, a smart business would be quick to realize that ROIs can be maximized and CuSats can touch sky levels, only when technologies and processes are combined with the most suitably designed and implemented applications.
Realizing this, most organizations today are looking to reduce redundancy within their IVRs -the crisp and familiar voice to where you land up when you call a toll-free number. They are opting for Command Language Interpreter (CLI)-based differential treatment, re-usable modules or dynamic IVRs to maximize customization levels.
However, amidst this need to design and customize the best possible application, what can be considered as a powerful solution is the medium in which it is implemented. Traditional IVRs rely completely on the voice inputs to service callers. The anticipation of a caller to finally spot his desired option while listening to an entire menu or the wait time required to have her needs serviced can easily be done away with, if the Voice IVR is switched to a Visually interactive interface.
A Visual IVR (V-IVR) is exactly the same voice application in terms of back-end integration and functionality, but is armed with a powerful visual medium. Considering the drastic changes in consumerism patterns, the world is swiftly moving towards touch and see. With the rise in smart phones, Visual IVR can prove to be one of the most innovative offerings in the field of contact center technologies. A visual medium will dramatically reduce customer frustrations or high call times. A research by a key Visual IVR proponent suggests an 80% reduction in the time taken for selecting the right option through the Visual IVR when compared to the classical Voice IVR. For a business, it reduces agent calls and average handling time (AHT) and zero outs. One also has the option to re-use VXML scripts of an existing voice IVR, to have a successful visual implementation in place. This is like a win-win for both the company and its customers.
Moving with the market trends, one can easily envision how the Visual IVR can fit as a precise solution, the way forward. The rise and boom of e-commerce has already set the tone for customer preferences. Buyers are flocking to their favourite websites to access a variety of products and make instant purchase decisions. This highlights their predilection for the visual medium and also for customer service. Any e- commerce business today should be ideally looking to complete their customer service with a solution that is in sync with their core audience. A V-IVR is the perfect offering to such a business. A caller can simply send a SMS to access the VIVR link and get his needs serviced. Combine this with predictive analytics and one can have a fruitful solution in understanding a customer’s intention for seeking customer service in the first place, which is called context. For example, a caller who has already bought a product may want to know the status of his request when he calls on the IVR. He could be prompted with a status message post which he can browse through other menus. If at any point he wants to reach an agent, the call will be transferred with the caller history and menu browsing context and this is a key advantage that V-IVR holds over other applications.
Another point is the ease of use of the solution. A business can make it available for mobiles or have it embedded as a widget in their website. This expands the platforms from which it can be accessed and hence, enhances customer service across multiple access points. It also ensures continuity from the web/mobile session to a visual session.
Anticipating the dynamic needs of the ever-growing target audience, I believe that firms in e-commerce, logistics, financial services and travel can all start moving towards a V-IVR. Large businesses like banks and telcos can always convert their existing IVRs to the visual medium. A major advantage of the V-IVR is the ease of re-use of the existing IVR scripts with no need for a fresh installation or call flow design. This means if a client already has an Avaya, Cisco or Genesys solution in place, they can utilize the same set up to incorporate the Visual IVR. This drastically reduces costs apart from leveraging on the existing investment. Needless to specify, it also results in increased levels of customer satisfaction.
Besides this, the visual design can always be customized as per client’s needs. An attractive visual template along-with a sound application design will always triumph over a voice version when it comes to customer self- service.
With these changing times it only makes sense to adopt innovative solutions to cater to a market space, which is fast growing with smart phones and tablets with a relatively young and technology savvy customer base. Darwin had already proclaimed the validity of ‘descent with modification’, ages ago. Evolution of new solutions seems to be a successful way forward, if science has to be believed at all!