Interactive voice response systems (IVRs) – love them or hate them, you need them. Whether you receive 200 calls per day or a million, a well-designed and up-to-date IVR can improve the effectiveness of your sales, service and collections departments. IVR technology, platforms and capabilities are undergoing a much-needed transformation.

1. Improving Customer Experience with IVR
June 2014
Sponsored By:

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Table of Contents
Introduction ........................................................................................................... 1
Visual IVR ............................................................................................................. 2
Voice Biometrics ................................................................................................... 3
IVR Analytics ........................................................................................................ 3
Simplified IVR Development Environments .......................................................... 5
Multi-Channel Outbound IVRs .............................................................................. 6
Final Thoughts ...................................................................................................... 7
About Connect First .............................................................................................. 8
About DMG Consulting LLC.................................................................................. 8

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Introduction
Interactive voice response systems (IVRs) – love them or hate them, you need them. Whether you receive 200 calls per day or a million, a well-designed and up- to-date IVR can improve the effectiveness of your sales, service and collections departments. IVR technology, platforms and capabilities are undergoing a much- needed transformation. IVRs have been effective cost savings tools for years. (Companies that claimed to be using IVRs to enhance their service quality were deceiving themselves, but that is a topic for a different white paper.)
The top issue with IVR systems today, from the customer perspective, is that the user interfaces are cumbersome, time-consuming and infuriating. This has been the number-one problem with IVRs for so long that either companies are not listening to their customers’ complaints, or there is another reason why they are not investing to improve them. For some companies, it may be because they are not customer-centric and use IVR as a way to reduce access to live (and expensive) agents, while others do not have the IT budget, knowledge or resources to make the necessary investments. This reflects a technology challenge. Most organizations do not know how to identify where customers are having trouble in their IVRs. And even if they can identify the pain points, they don’t know how to modify their IVR programs, scripts and voice user interfaces (VUIs). It’s taken too long – over 20 years – but some IVR vendors have finally figured out that they can improve usability and, ultimately, the customer experience, by enhancing their platforms, analytics and development tools.
There is a new generation of IVR solutions coming to market with vastly enhanced technical environments that address the needs of today’s contact centers. These enhanced IVR solutions accommodate the requirement for continuous change and improvement. This white paper will review the top 5 IVR technical and platform enhancements that are currently being introduced to the market. What’s striking about these improvements is that they are geared toward business users and not IT, as IVR vendors now appreciate that it’s contact center managers and supervisors who are responsible for managing these solutions on a day-to-day basis, particularly if they are in the cloud.

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Figure 1: The Problem with IVRs
Source: DMG Consulting LLC, June 2014
Visual IVR
The worlds of IVR and mobility are colliding, and the result is visual IVR. Visual IVR is a relatively new concept where a company creates a menu-driven interface for their IVR, website and mobile applications. The process is conceptually simple but requires a uniquely designed interface.
Here is how it works; the IVR script is translated into a visual display of options, and presented to users via the Web or mobile device (smartphone) so that customers or prospects can conduct their business by touching or clicking an option. As most people can read a sentence much more quickly than they can listen to it spoken, this affords them the power, capabilities and flexibility of IVR in significantly less time.
A major reason why visual IVR is catching on so quickly is because these applications are designed to allow companies to build the visual interfaces without rewriting their existing IVR applications. Although the content of user interfaces (UIs) required for mobile devices is totally different from what is presented verbally over a traditional IVR or speech recognition application, much of the existing code and application is used, and the primary change is in how it is presented.

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All companies that use IVRs should consider the opportunity to increase utilization by offering IVR capabilities to their customers and prospects via a smartphone application. To do so, companies should work with a vendor that offers this next- gen IVR functionality, and should use the services of a visual IVR expert to build the mobile application and UI. It’s important to avoid the same mistake that many companies have made with their traditional IVRs: assuming that any programmer can build an IVR script or voice user interface (VUI). This has never been the case, and remains one of the primary reasons why so many IVRs are poorly designed and executed.
Voice Biometrics
Voice biometrics, also known as voice recognition, is a practical science whose time has finally come. This technology, which uses the characteristics of each speaker’s voice to identify them, has been commercially available since the late 1990’s, but until recently was impractical as a business application because it was too cumbersome and difficult to use. Though it may require a significant amount of time for each user to establish a valid voice print for verification purposes, more people are now willing to put forth the effort because of growing security concerns.
The primary use for voice biometrics today is to fully automate the process of verifying callers so that once they set up a voice print, they do not need to answer a number of security questions with information that could pose a significant risk of identity theft, such as their address, last few credit card transactions, or even a personal ID. (As each person’s voice has unique characteristics that are extremely difficult for a thief to steal or duplicate, voice biometrics is considered the most accurate and least intrusive way of verifying callers. As companies get better at rolling out voice biometrics programs, the adoption rate of this technology will improve. As a result, doing business by phone will become one of the most secure ways to interact with a company, as well as increasingly simple and quick, which will, in turn, reduce enterprise costs and improves the customer experience.
Companies that want to greatly reduce the risk of a fraudster gaining access to their customers’ sensitive information should consider the use of voice biometrics. The voice verification process is handled by an IVR, but this does not mean that the IVR has to handle the rest of the interaction, unless desired by a caller. While voice biometrics is not for everyone, DMG expects it to become the “front door” to an increasing number of organizations, particularly those dedicated to the protection of sensitive customer data.
IVR Analytics
IVR analytics is designed to systemically capture, track and evaluate the “whole call” caller experience in order to leverage the information to improve the overall

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customer experience across all channels, automated and live agent. This includes capturing, tracking and analyzing the caller’s experience during their entire interaction in granular detail, from their initial contact with the organization, which is often via the IVR, through resolution, which could be done in the IVR or by an agent.
The output of this analysis is used to:
 Identify call reasons
 Identify what happened in each call (call outcomes)
 Evaluate the total caller experience, including the amount of frustration and effort expended by the customer to get their issue addressed
 Identify new automation opportunities
 Identify activities that prevent or impede an organization’s ability to deliver outstanding service.
Too few companies analyze the performance of their IVRs on a continuous basis, as they should. The thought process is that once an IVR application is built and customers become accustomed to it, there is little reason to change it. The reality is that few organizations are able to dedicate the time and resources to identifying what needs to be changed and updated in their IVR, even if they appreciate that enhancing it could improve the customer experience and increase the containment rate; as long as the containment rate remains relatively consistent, the IVR is left alone. This is a mistake and one that is not difficult to correct. All companies should review the performance of their IVRs quarterly. In companies where the IVR handles more than 80% of incoming calls, its performance should be carefully analyzed monthly, as a small issue could turn into a large and costly one, if not caught on a timely basis.
Below are five IVR key performance indicators (KPIs) that should be used to assess the performance of any IVR. Figure 2: Top IVR KPIs KPI Definition Benefit
Customer displacement/automation rate
Percentage of calls that are fully satisfied in the IVR and do not require the assistance of agents
This is the primary (and often the only) KPI used to measure the performance of an IVR; if measured properly and consistently, it is a good gauge of the health of the IVR
Customer drop-out rate
Tracks exactly where IVR users drop out of the
Allows companies to identify where an IVR

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Figure 2: Top IVR KPIs KPI Definition Benefit
application and request a live agent
application is confusing or there is a problem with the script
Automated speech recognition (ASR) recognition rate
Measures the accuracy of the ASR engine
Identifies where grammars are out of date and callers are struggling to communicate with the IVR
Average time in the IVR
Tracks the average amount of time callers spend in the IVR
Determines when there are changing patterns and alerts the company to potential issues
Percent of repeat callers
Identifies and tracks repeat IVR callers
Identifies changes in usage patterns
Source: DMG Consulting LLC, June 2014
All high-performance IVR solutions, whether on-premise or in the cloud, should provide standard reports with this information on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. It’s even better when the IVR provider offers a service to help companies continuously improve the performance of their IVR solutions. Surprisingly, few users are aware that this diagnostic data is available to them, and even fewer dedicate the resources to address it on a timely basis. As this data can greatly improve the effectiveness of the IVR, it should be a priority for all users. And, if the visual IVR is being used to offer self-service functionality, it’s essential to have diagnostics that measure the performance of this new channel.
Simplified IVR Development Environments
Since IVRs were introduced to the market, development has been done by IT departments (or other IT professionals, such as third-party consultants) because of the necessity for programming skills. There are many challenges with this approach, including limited resources, lack of responsiveness to the needs of the business, taking too long to get the work done, lack of understanding of the business, limited experience in building VUIs, etc.
Many contact center managers would build and maintain their own IVRs if the development environments were easier to use. While it has taken way too long to address this weakness, there are finally new IVR development environments coming to market that are visually oriented and use a drag-and-drop object- oriented approach that makes it possible for non-programmers to develop and enhance IVR applications. While training and some practice is required for people to learn to use these new IVR development environments, they are designed for business users.

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Contact center managers who want to improve their customers’ IVR experience and reduce the time and cost of building and enhancing IVR applications should user IVR analytics to identify ways to improve their applications. By migrating to the new visually oriented IVR development environments, they can assume responsibility for their mission-critical solutions.
Multi-Channel Outbound IVRs
Companies are starting to build multi-channel (also known as omni-channel) inbound and outbound engagement strategies, and IVRs are essential to the process. These software-based solutions are highly effective at cost effectively engaging customers in their channel of choice. (This assumes that the organization is authorized to reach out to them in accordance with the pertinent regulations in the country where they operate.) In the old days, if something went wrong, most companies would wait for customers to call. The assumption was that most people wouldn’t find out, so why bother to tell them. In the social media world, this is no longer the case. A company problem or mistake can quickly go viral, but it often takes quite a while for a company to recover, particularly if it doesn’t appear as if they took the right actions to notify their customers or the public.
Then, there are courtesy situations where it would be nice to reach out to a customer. In some situations, a company may want to share information that may or may not be helpful. In other cases, a customer may know of a problem and be waiting for a status update or resolution. On the service side alone, there are dozens of circumstances where it would be helpful and meaningful to cost effectively reach out to a customer.
Companies that keep customers engaged in a positive way (not because they make mistakes) are likely to retain their customers longer and possibly even be positioned to build the relationship. If the engagement is viewed as positive and valuable, customers will appreciate the “touch.” But there are many challenges associated with this new concept and strategy. Companies have to figure out how to provide personalized customer service cost effectively, whether inbound, outbound or blended, and using agent-assisted or agent-less channels (voice, email, instant messaging (IM), short message service (SMS), fax, social media, video). An omni-channel approach allows customers to interact with the vendor’s business whenever, wherever and however they choose, across all available channels. To do this right, an organization needs to develop a unified view of their customers, regardless of the channel in which they interact on an inbound and outbound basis.
Outbound IVR solutions will be vital in delivering on this new engagement strategy. Companies should look for vendors and solutions with both the technology and expertise to help them do this right.

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Final Thoughts
IVRs remain essential and powerful tools for contact centers, whether they handle 30% or 95% of all incoming transactions. When used on an outbound basis, they have also become an essential component and driver of multi-channel customer engagement strategies, which are proving to be highly effective. The underlying IVR (and speech) technology of these solutions has been good for years; the change is in industry best practices. When IVRs were introduced to the market, the plan was to make a substantial one-time investment in the platform and script/VUI, and then operate it “as is” for years. It quickly became clear that this was not an ideal approach, but companies wanted to get a payback from their initial IVR investments before even considering IVR enhancements.
The cloud is changing this equation. Cloud-based IVR vendors have needed to become more flexible to win business, and they’ve gotten creative with their offerings. Early on, these vendors were willing to absorb some of the IVR development costs to win business from premise-based competitors. Now they are aggressively competing with each other, and to reduce their operating costs, they are delivering much-needed innovation to the market, primarily by giving business managers the tools to control their own IVR destiny.

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About Connect First
Connect First is a leading cloud contact center infrastructure provider that focuses on customer satisfaction and rock-solid reliability. Connect First’s robust platform is designed and supported by a team of highly experienced engineers, architects and business analysts, and backed with award- winning, in-house customer support. Solutions include ACD, Predictive Dialing and Compliance Suite (TCPA and PCI), Call Tracking, IVR Studio, Real-Time Telemetry, Extensive Reporting and more. Through a consultative approach with each customer, Connect First solutions are customizable and flexible to meet the needs of a discerning customer base and designed to elevate your business. Visit our website at www.connectfirst.com or call 888-965-1588 for more information.
About DMG Consulting LLC
DMG Consulting LLC is a leading independent research, advisory and consulting firm specializing in contact centers, back-office and real-time analytics. DMG provides insight and strategic guidance and tactical advice to end users, vendors and the financial community. Each year, DMG devotes more than 10,000 hours to producing primary research on IT sectors, including workforce optimization (quality management/liability recording), speech analytics, workforce management, performance management, desktop analytics, surveying/voice of the customer, text analytics, cloud-based contact center infrastructure, dialing, interactive voice response systems and proactive customer care. Our actionable solutions are proven to deliver a lasting competitive advantage, and often pay for themselves in as little as three months. Learn more at www.dmgconsult.com.

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