Welcome back to the Omnichannel Blog Series. In Part 1, we tackled some of the basics around CTI and the most common use cases. Today, we dive into IVR and the many ways IVR is becoming a catalyst in building consistency in customer experience.
First, let's take a quick step back in history. Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems have been part of the daily fabric of customer services operations since the early 1970s. The traditional IVR of old brought us the familiar "Press ONE for Customer Support, press 2 for Sales", etc. For many companies looking to improve their customer's ability to reach sales or billing, this directed model was a leap in the right direction. Gradually this was adopted and became highly synonymous with any customer service inquiry directed to an organization.
In the early 1990s, Computer Telephony Integration strategies came of age and were fundamental to the extension of IVR journeys that companies built. Moving to the early 2000s, IVR's became a mainstream tool for call center operations and had taken their place as a staple for survival in customer experiences. Some of these companies succeeded in a more simplistic sense. Many of them did not. And unfortunately, innovations in this arena have been adopted slowly and sometimes painfully as technologies in the hands of customers were not readily adopted by the companies trying to provide support. Fast forward a bit to the present day and we find that a lot has changed from access to better technology, access to more systems in the front end of a customer journey, and a whole toolkit that can be used to build customer experiences that are consistent across channels.
As enterprise organizations look to digital transformation to drive a greater degree of automation and self-service, the underlying fact remains that 73% of interactions originating in digital channels very frequently escalate to an agent over voice. And yes, we now see a shift in the landscape that is much more widely adopted among digital devices being at the fingertips of customers. The omnichannel experience means that a customer very often will start an engagement from an IVR, be managed by a workflow or intelligent routing engine for self-service that collects important meta-data about the customer, and then ends up on a digital channel such as email, chat, SMS, or other channels of choice that differ by region across the globe. In many cases, the prevalence of alternate channels at the fingertips of customers often precedes companies adopting and supporting those digital channels as rapidly. For instance, social media was the craze for many years and a company wouldn't consider implementing a solution without checking the box for social integrations. Fast forward 5 years later and companies are still struggling to implement and drive adoption of these oft lower-cost mechanisms for resolving customer issues. We learned quite a bit from 2020, but one relevant statistic that was counter to more recent predictions by analysts is that voice actually increased rather than decreased in volume. In short, the voice channel, and by default IVR call flows, remain an important part of the customer service value chain.
As a quick side note, among the research about customer experience, it's important to note how important consistency is when designing and developing customer journeys. The vast majority of customers have a preferred channel and they want to know that no matter what channel they choose, they will experience the same level of connection, interaction, and speed-to-resolution as they would if they were forced to choose a less preferred channel. The relevance of being able to use a single engine for IVR in combination with intelligent AI, bots, and other self-service mechanisms has become extremely important to drive satisfaction on those channels. The barriers to entry have become much lower than in the past where opening a new channel was somewhat risky and/or expensive. 3C Logic has developed integrations to ServiceNow that take full advantage of your favorite product features like Virtual Agent Designer, Agent Workspace, Manager Workspace, and Advanced Work Assignment to drive consistency across voice and digital channels.
So coming back, why the lack of evolution if the IVR experience is so important? IVR's originated from legacy on-premise vendors such as Cisco, Avaya, and Genesys. Often very expensive, technical to install, slow to configure, and painful to manage (those vendors mentioned have come a long way since then!). But, on-premise systems still make up 80% of the current market. And while cloud alternatives have since become available and addressed some of the inherent cumbersomeness of older generations of IVRs, most still fail to solve one very key issue - access to relevant customer data.
To solve the issue of data, many modern cloud call center platforms have gradually encroached into the realm of CRMs, acting as mini systems-of-record to improve IVR routing capabilities, etc. However, very often the better approach is to deeply integrate IVR and voice capabilities as a native extension of the primary system of record to:
- avoid the need for duplication of data
- simplify reporting into one primary system
- easily manage voice side-by-side with native digital channels already available
- offer a single agent and administrative workspace to limit swivel-chairing
More importantly, as AI and Natural Language Understanding has evolved in recent years, the ability to create sophisticated experiences when customers call is now more feasible than ever - assuming of course the IVR call flow and underlying AI has access to relevant customer data to drive personalized experiences. AI is the wave of the future, but it feels like customers are in that same interesting "check the box" state they were in with social media integrations: not quite sure how to implement. The importance of aligning a customer with a mature contact center and workflow process optimizations should lie squarely in the software provider's lap. Meaning, CRM and CCaaS/CCI players must be the ones driving the most sought-after and impactful use cases that are packaged and easy to use, from a customer perspective.
"Key Features/Benefits of 3CLogic IVR Designer with ServiceNow:
- Conversational AI and self-service call flows with 3CLogic powered by Google NLU
- Intelligent call routing leveraging ServiceNow customer data and tables
- ServiceNow embedded IVR designer for low code/no code call flow designing - "look ma, no technical assistance required"
- Use of ServiceNow operational handlers to enable out-of-the-box use cases with no need for custom work or long project delivery times"
The good news is that ServiceNow and 3CLogic have paved a strong working cadence in building just that - a modern approach to voice self-service and intelligent live agent routing to provide a modern solution for a modern era. Other contact centers and CTI providers are following suit and building innovative ways to marry the experiences between both providers as well. It's truly a great time to be working through these types of scenarios that drive better customer journeys and outcomes. As we build these lasting and adaptable future states, we will find that these experiences will be driven by your customers while your agents will be in a solid contextual position to handle any requests that come their way.
In our next series, we will break down the world of Voice Bots, AI, Natural Language Understanding, and how to implement these for greater success in driving adoption of these channels.
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