IVR

Contact centers are being buffeted by several trends: a challenging economy that has renewed pressure to cut costs yet at the same time retain customers and revenues and growth in use of new channels by customers from anywhere.

 

We posed three questions to a sample of contact center routing solution suppliers to get their take on them.

 

1. What trends/changes/shifts are you seeing from your contact center customers with regards to the types of calls, routing, volume, and services that you are handling from them?

 

2. Are you seeing and are you projecting to see a shift to IVR/speech recognition from live agents and why and for what types of calls?

 

3. Are you seeing and are you projecting to see reduced or reduced growth in inbound call volume as a result of SMS, chat, and web self-service?

 

Wendy Mikkelsen, contact center product marketing, Nortel

 

The typical customer is changing to a new customer that is highly wired and technically savvy.  They expect to connect to your business from mobile devices, from Web pages and maybe both. They want voice, e-mail, IM and text message options. This new customer embraces changing technology and lavishes themselves with the means to employ it. Businesses are beginning to realize that in order to serve this new customer generation, they must offer choice and anticipate their customers needs in order to offer an exceptional customer experience.

 

Our customers are taking advantage of our expertise in the customer contact business to integrate their communications environment in order to better serve the customer. Custom applications are being developed at a rapid pace to help businesses integrate IT and business applications to become more anticipatory and agile, allowing them to automate and quickly adapt to changing competitive environments.

 

Automation will always be a key component of each and every business, and at this point IVR/self-service has become table stakes. At the same time live agent interaction will always be necessary, but many functions can be automated to save businesses considerable costs. And as always, the most efficient company with the best cost structure wins. Solutions that provide optimization benefits like Expert Anywhere, Speech Analytics or WFO are obvious and desirable choices. But there is a whole new way to maximize or fully engage the contact center and the IVR investment. Competitive companies are utilizing a SOA approach where the functionalities of their contact center or IVR can be embedded right into an IT system as a Web service. This brings an entire new and differentiated method for businesses who are striving to achieve real customer loyalty.

We anticipate that voice live agent interactions will be reduced as more businesses begin to offer multiple channels of communications. As stated above, live agent functions will always be necessary (and in some businesses absolutely critical) but for the mass market, new forms of communication will reduce the need for voice to live agent interaction.  We also see where multimedia will enhance the callers experience even when agent assistance is requested, e.g. a caller could request to conference in with an agent while using self-service, then continue with the self-service application after the agent drops off the call.

 

Darlene Robinson, solutions marketing manager, Siemens Enterprise Communications

 

Certainly proactive outbound, fully blended with inbound contacts (including all media types like e-mail, voice, Web chats) are a trend in many of the contact centers that we encounter.  Also, there is a larger demand these days for hosted IVR or shared IVR services as a means for the enterprise to add automation quickly and easily while they do not have to deal with the complexity of ongoing maintenance and performance monitoring within their own contact center premises.  The driver tends to be that contact center do not have the staff to support such efforts, and they need the ability to change the design and enlarge the port capacity on the fly. Many IVRs in the market do not cost effectively allow that for customers, so hosted options are a better fit and pricepoint for many of our clients, who often do not have on-premise staff training to address the needs either. 

 

In general, there is a tremendous shift towards virtualization: the contact center moving beyond the boundaries of a traditional single premise-based design. The demand trend is not for having premise-based, hardware intensive systems at every large site that networks together only in a complex way. Rather the demand is to address the needs to add agents from remote locations and bringing those small/midsized enterprises in to contact transactions on-demand or via presence awareness.  

 

There is more a trend for speech to be available via that hosted IVR service as mentioned earlier primarily due to the fact that speech application development is costly and requires months of detailed design in some cases to deploy.  In 50-300 agent contact centers, this trend is more common.  Certainly the need is to have those speech application augmented to enable automatic transfer to the live agent pool at any time a customer requires.  Integration of the two is a must, including blended performance monitoring of the two solutions (an off-premise IVR and an on-premise contact center routing, CTI (News - Alert)-enabled, and multimedia solution). Anytime live agents can be substituted for automated agents the cost to run the center drops dramatically as consistency and hours of availability rise. In this economy, the value of a operating expense (OPEX (News - Alert)) solution, which hosted solutions are an example of, are much more appealing over a capital expense (CAPEX) solution.

 

Regarding types of call, it ranges from every horizontal and vertical market.  However, large demand is now coming from our healthcare-related customer opportunities and installed base accounts.  Examples include claims processing, workman’s compensation applications, and appointment scheduling with outbound confirmation via speech.

 

We are seeing and projecting to see reduced or reduced growth in voice to live agents as a result of SMS, chat, and web self-service but only where applicable. For complex types of calls that are intricate and require time to complete, a personal touch with end-customers is still common.  However, adding some basic automation, quickly and cost effectively, to ensure an enterprise can do more with less or the same number of resources for lower TCO and cost containment purposes is most common.  Even with web self-service our customers still want an option to enable very quick and ease interaction capabilities that can blend media from web to voice to e-mail for example.

 

Roberta Mackintosh, executive director global voice, Verizon Business

 

During an economic downturn, enterprise customers are increasingly turning to hosted contact center services as a way to achieve cost savings while they retain excellent service. Furthermore, the ever-increasing demand for customer care, combined with corporate resource constraints, has led to more pressure for first-call resolution; this in turn has escalated the demand for intelligent routing services and self-service.

 

There is also heightened interest in virtual contact centers and home-based agents; this provides enterprises with the flexibility they need to handle dynamic call volumes and to meet business continuity demands.  

 

The shift from live agents to self-service via speech recognition has been gradual but steady.  We continue to see customers using speech for three general purposes:  1) up-front menus/routing; 2) collection of data that is then delivered to the agent to shorten average handle time; and 3) self-service transactions, such as for literature orders, address changes, account information, and payments. 

 

We expect to see the shift to self-service continue and perhaps accelerate in the coming year as enterprises focus on customer retention while trying to limit staffing costs. Additionally, as application developers continue to make improvements in design and user expectations, customer adoption should continue to pick up speed.

 

Even as call centers have evolved into true contact centers, utilizing multiple contact channels, the telephone remains the most popular medium for interacting with agents.  SMS, chat, Web self-service, and e-mail have all made inroads on voice but that has been more than offset by overall increases in contact center inquiries, so the net effect has been increased call volumes, although the rate of increase appears to be slowing. 

 

The alternate forms of customer contact (SMS, chat and Web) are expected to meet the demands of the burgeoning mobility market. Additionally these capabilities provide an environment to bring in remote agents more easily. In an economic environment where businesses are looking for a variety of solutions to lower costs, bringing in work-at-home agents provides a creative solution. Remote workers also offer a “greener” alternative to center based agents. Our network-based Web Center allows business to reduce their environmental footprints by allowing remote workers access to key business technologies while handling the communication requirements of external customers. With a hosted service model and support for remote agents, Hosted ICR can help companies reduce their investments in infrastructure hardware and energy resources plus reduce the need for some employees to commute to offices.