Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

As customer interactions increase in contact centers throughout multiple industries, center leaders are constantly searching for ways to handle each customer contact with the same level of service that every customer demands. One option that many contact centers have implemented is interactive voice response (IVR)/speech platforms. 

 

Earlier this year, Forrester Research surveyed 347 contact center decision makers for North American and European organizations to determine their plans for integrating IVR in their contact centers. Of those surveyed, 153 enterprises, or 44 percent, were currently utilizing IVR systems. Exactly half of these organizations continue to use touch-tone systems.

 

The number of customer using partially speech-enabled or fully speech-enabled systems is growing. Customers currently using partially speech enabled systems is at 44 percent and those using fully speech-enabled systems is currently at 28 percent.

 

Both partially and fully speech-enabled systems can offer significant benefit to the companies that are utilizing the systems. These benefits are becoming more obvious as adoption rates of such systems are expected to continue to increase in the coming years. In fact, more than half of the contact center organizations surveyed that have fully deployed speech-enabled systems expect to have all IVR applications using speech technology within five years.

 

The Forrester survey also indicated that the standards-based speech solutions will continue to become more familiar and acceptable with customer service executives and IP operations executives as an upgrade strategy for legacy IVRs in the next few years.

 

One of the main drivers for IVR technology is the change in customer demand. Technology and the Internet have changed the way that the customer anticipates and expects a company to make information, products and services available to them. It is no longer acceptable for organizations throughout various industries to operate on a 9 to 5 schedule and only serve customers during this timeframe.

 

Even the banking industry, famous for its hours or lack thereof, has recognized that consumers now want all access all the time, no matter where they are. If a company doesn’t offer this, they better hope that none of their competitors do, either.

 

Implementing an IVR system actually can help the organization and contact center better to deliver the level of service that its customers expect, without always taking drastic measures to expand operations or hours. Robust IVR systems also reduce the amount of workload for the contact center agents, lessening their stress and improving their environment to ensure they can deliver high quality customer service.

 

Each of these elements is certainly a contributor to the upward trend of IVR implementation and other speech-enabled technologies. Technology is demanding that organizations move faster every day; fortunately, there is also technology to make this happen.

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