Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Contact Solutions Launches Adaptive IVR that Learns from Caller Behavior

February 25, 2015

We are all familiar with Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems as the first thing we typically encounter when calling a contact center. The fact of the matter is that today’s IVR capabilities can do a lot more than just give us options for directing calls to the appropriate resources. They are in fact valuable tools for contact center administrators in terms of improving the customer experience. In fact, as illustrated by the recent announcement by Reston, VA-based cloud-based customer care solutions provider Contact Solutions of its Adaptive Personalization, they can be extremely valuable.


The company’s Adaptive Personalization is a new multi-layered personalization solution driven by behavior-based business intelligence and predictive analytics. As Contact Solutions points out, traditional IVR treats every caller the same way which leads to all of us feeling a bit unloved based on our unique needs when we initiate an interaction.  Contact Solutions says, “The new solution creates highly personalized and effortless customer care experiences within the IVR that fully reflect customer behaviors and preferences.”

Personalization is the key.  Adaptive Personalization enables organizations to respond to caller behaviors and preferences, streamline authentication processes, and dynamically adapt calls at each interaction point in the call flow.  The benefits of this are cited in examples where early adopters have seen calls shortened by more than 35 percent and transfer rates reduced by more than 70 percent with up to 90 percent of callers experiencing more optimized self-service.

Adaptive Personalization includes three components:

  • Adaptive Recall: Learns customer needs based on enterprise data and behaviors over multiple calls to streamline problem resolution based on preferences.
  • Adaptive Audio: Responds instantly to adapt at each interaction point based on real- time behaviors within a call to match customer pace and reduce caller frustration.
  • Adaptive Intelligence: provides an order of magnitude more data on customer interactions and the customer journey than a typical IVR, enabling the enterprise to identify actionable customer insights and opportunities to improve CX.

"Having access to the right data and knowing how to apply it can be the difference between winning and losing business. In today's fast-moving, hypercompetitive world, customers want to be treated as unique individuals and expect companies they do business with to know them, and anything less is a bad experience.  Adaptive Personalization allows enterprises to provide that level of individualized service," said Michael McShea, SVP, Marketing and Product Management at Contact Solutions. "With up to 98 percent of customer calls into a contact center being automated in the IVR for many of our customers, the IVR is still highly critical to overall customer CX, and may be the main source of experience with a brand. The IVR channel is operating against the same expectations for personalization that customers are used to getting through other channels, and with the Contact Solutions Adaptive IVR we can deliver on that experience."

The benefits cited from the creation of a more personalized experience are noteworthy.  They include:

  • Understanding how customers interact with the contact center IVR, what those interactions cost organization, and how they impact customer experience.
  • Identification of customers that are struggling with IVR and improving their experiences — before they signal frustration by opting out of the call.
  • Adapting IVR to individual caller behavior in real-time.
  • Providing real-time caller interaction and customer journey information at every step in self-service interactions to help drive strategic decisions.
  • Creating speedier customer problem resolution that can be translated to shorter calls that boost in customer satisfaction and lower IVR channel costs.

In short, IVR innovation can be a game changer when it comes to making us feel wanted when we call a contact center. The ability to personalize interactions from the first point of contact is differentiated value that is sure to get attention from contact center administrators as they seek to fulfill their mandates to improve the customer experience (CX) as well as operational efficiencies. 




Edited by Maurice Nagle



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