Mountain View, California-based eGain Communications has announced the availability of eGain IVR. 

 

Company officials said it adds "human-like intelligence to IVR" while unifying it with other interaction channels, including Web self-service. The product is part of eGain's suite for multichannel customer service, eGain Service. It's being billed by eGain officials as reducing the total cost of ownership of multichannel self-service and customer service operational costs, "while enabling end-customers to accomplish more through IVR."

 

It comes in two flavors -- eGain IVR (Standard) helps handle informational and transactional customer service queries, using the eGain CIH platform, such as the common multichannel knowledge base, interaction records, customer database, and integration with back end systems. EGain IVR (Advanced), in addition to the standard features, has the Guided Help module, which uses the CBR technology of eGain Inference Reasoning Engine. This option enables interactive dialogs simulating customer conversations with the best human agents, in the words of eGain officials allowing businesses "to offer self-service for complex interactions that would usually need the intervention of experts."

 

IVR systems are notorious for frustrating users with inadequate content and the "IVR black hole" syndrome, where the user is trapped in a self-service maze, of the "press 26 to hear the menu again" variety. "Without meaning to, some companies have essentially taught consumers to avoid self-service channels because it is nearly impossible to accomplish their goals by using them," writes Dr. Natalie L. Petouhoff, Senior Analyst at Forrester (News - Alert), in an August 2008 report titled "Why Talking To Your Customers Is Ruining Your Business" from "The Gap in the Customer Service Experience" series.

EGain officials say to avoid this, their IVR uses CBR technology "to capture agent expertise in the knowledge base and prompt customers with appropriate questions in a way that the best agents would, until an answer or the next best step is found." They contend that this allows IVR users to access the same information and complete the same transactions that they would be able to accomplish through other channels. 

EGain IVR can be deployed as an on-site, on-demand, or managed product.