IVRs Get Set for the Omnichannel Challenge

The First Step on a Long Journey

So where are firms now in the process? “Most companies are close to the starting point of the omnichannel journey,” says Evan Dobkin, product marketing manager at Aspect Software. For instance, in many businesses, speech analytics systems have only rudimentarily been integrated with email and chat. A tweet may notify a business about an irate customer, but fixing the problem now is typically done via other channels (say a call to the contact center) rather than via Twitter.

A number of hurdles have to be cleared to reach the omnichannel Promised Land. One challenge revolves around IVR system maturity. These systems have been used for decades, so vendors have often cobbled together newer technology with older platforms. Nowadays, consumers use telephones, laptops, desktops, mobile phones, and tablets to reach their vendors, but few IVRs were designed to work with mobile devices. Hence, a great deal of integration work is needed to tie the two together.

The software landscape has also been dynamic. Mobile devices work with a variety of emerging technologies. New payment options, such as Apple’s iPay and Google’s GooglePay, are gaining traction. Quick response (QR) codes increase shopping and payment convenience and are being tied to other emerging solutions, such as in-store signage, to form new kinds of marketing campaigns. So a great deal of integration work needs to be undertaken to provide true omnichannel experiences.

Consistency Is Key

Despite the growing diversity in devices and software, consistency is needed. Companies need to understand their product or service differentiators and deliver them across all of their channels. A customer using a telephone to query an order should have an experience similar to that of a customer connecting to the firm via Twitter.

To deliver that consistency, an enterprise must select a central hub. E-commerce, mobile commerce, and brick-and-mortar stores should all have a similar look and feel, but realizing that goal is complicated. “The biggest gotcha is figuring out which system will be used as the central repository; each channel has its own unique set of systems,” Gray notes.

A lot of attention recently has been focused on new marketing channels like Twitter, but the omnichannel process often begins or ends with the consumer picking up the telephone and interacting with an IVR. “When customers pick up the phone, they conduct deeper, richer interactions with their vendors,” says Deborah Rapsinski, director of contact center consulting at Digital DataVoice.

Meeting Customer Expectations

Frankly, this experience to date has often fallen short of customer expectations. IVRs have been criticized as difficult to use, with users grousing about the myriad of menus they must navigate before resolving their issue. Companies have too often focused on offloading tasks from agent to machine to reduce costs. The end result is that the systems work for the organization but not for the customer.

Rather than stress cost cutting, businesses should revamp systems based on how the customer views the experience. In many cases, the IVR has been largely sitting on its own island. “Currently, IVR logs are not tied to other systems,” Gray says. Tighter integration between the IVR and mobile apps, chat, SMS, and visual experiences is needed. Gradually, IVRs have to transition from interactive voice response systems to interactive multimedia response solutions.

In business since 2000, [24]7 offers an IVR solution that draws on deep neural network (DNN) capabilities, which rely on more than 10 billion utterances to improve speech recognition. The agent can interact with speech- and text-based interactions via a single interface. The product offers analytics that track, adaptively learn, and tailor engagements to the customer’s—rather the company’s—needs.

The Aspect IVR solution supports public, hybrid, or private cloud deployments. The system features voice biometrics to ensure that callers are who they claim to be. In July 2013, Aspect purchased Voxmeo, an omnichannel solution provider, for $50 million and has been integrating its IVR solution with Voxmeo’s omnichannel system.

Interactions’ IVR relies on acoustic models that increase system accuracy and help mitigate the sound problems that can arise when a customer talks on a mobile phone. The solution’s text-to-speech features compare recorded speech in a database to callers’ input. The individual speech sounds (phonemes) are labeled and the best set of sounds for natural-sounding spoken words is selected. The system works with male or female voices speaking North American English or Latin American Spanish.

A number of other vendors are focused on improving IVR omnichannel experiences; AT&T, Avaya, Cisco Systems, Convergys, Database Systems, Digital DataVoice, Dialogic Corporation, Enghouse Systems, Genesys, IBM, Mitel Networks, Nuance Communications, Verizon Communications, and West Corporation are all building omnichannel IVR solutions.