IVR

Organizations have a love-hate relationship with automated inbound and outbound IVR self-service. This tool has long been tolerated for its ability to significantly reduce costs through diverting calls away from live agents. Yet the quality of those interactions have often left something to be desired, prompting too many customers to zero-out or hang up, thereby driving costs up and satisfaction and sales down.

 

Convergys hopes to change that, and to its advantage with a pair of new inbound and outbound IVR solutions, devised following its Intervoice (News - Alert) last year, that meshes global BPO firm’s well-honed Convergys Dynamic Decisioning Solution with Intervoice technology. DDS, reported consultant Nancy Jamison, is “an enterprise-wide policy management solution that can access and work with business systems across the enterprise, including, billing, CRM, etc., to provide a consistent customer experience across all customer touch points.”

 

The new Convergys (News - Alert) inbound IVR solution, Intelligent Self-Service, empowers companies to take full advantage of every customer interaction and leverage that valuable data to drive down operating costs, increase revenue opportunities, and maximize customer satisfaction and loyalty.

 

Unlike other solutions that use intelligence to simply route the customer to the appropriate agent, the intelligence within Convergys Intelligent Self-Service follows customers through their entire interaction experience. That is from the time they initially make contact to the time their issue is resolved.

 

Intelligent Self-Service can also improve the ability to identify the caller and capture profile information. The caller’s intent is determined based on their menu selections and historical behavior, and profile-driven prompts and menus adjust and become more personalized as the customer continues to use self-service.

 

The Intelligent Self-Service solution quickly provides a tighter integration with current business systems, including CRM, billing, and legacy systems. With it, prior investments in collecting and maintaining historical information can achieve greater value than ever before. The information on customers’ interactions personalizes typical automation capabilities that can provide increased IVR containment, more cross-sell/upsell opportunities, and proactive communications.

 

The Convergys Intelligent Self-Service enables, promises, and in beta tests and pilots with clients has achieved:

 

*          Personalizing the customer experience to increase loyalty and retention while reducing call handle times by up to 20 percent

 

*          Accelerating self-service adoption rates to reduce costs and increase call containment rates by up to 20 percent

 

*          Leveraging cross-sell and upsell opportunities to increase revenue

 

*          Eliminating the risk and expense of a ‘forklift technology upgrade

Convergys’ experience has shown that clients who implement intelligent solutions can realize rapid ROI: often within six to twelve months. It can help firms achieve cost reductions of up to 25 percent by delivering personalized and relevant customer interactions by enabling centralized policy creation and management, supported by closed-loop learning, to ensure a consistent customer experience across all channels.

 

For example a pilot with a leading national financial services company improved call containment in the company’s IVR to almost 93 percent from below 90 percent. From this the firm expects to see an additional savings of almost $500,000 annually, based on a cost of $3 per agent-handled call. Based on this success, the company is now using the solution to stimulate revenue by automating customers’ IRA and CD renewal processes.

 

“Any company that has contact centers that need to increase their revenue opportunities and decrease operational costs can benefit from intelligent automation,” said Jamison. “Convergys is the first company to crack the code on the value of bundling intelligent automation with an IVR.”

 

The new Convergys outbound Intelligent Notification solution provides a tighter integration with current business systems, including CRM, billing, and legacy systems. With it, investments in collecting and maintaining historical information can achieve greater value than ever before.

 

The information on customers’ interactions personalizes typical automation capabilities intended to drive increased IVR containment, more cross-sell/upsell opportunities, and proactive communications. Normal outbound notifications can be personalized, automated proactive communications with the Intelligent Notification solution.

 

The Convergys Intelligent Notification Solution can be used throughout the entire customer lifecycle – from customer acquisition/winback to customer service to customer loyalty/retention and to collections. For example, in the financial services industry, a credit card customer can receive an outbound IVR courtesy call or text message after an unusual flurry of activity on their card to ensure the card has not been lost or stolen. Upon receiving this notification, the customer can choose to be seamlessly connected to inbound self-service or a live agent.

 

Adding intelligence Convergys says can turn typical applications into competitive differentiators by allowing companies to:

 

*          Drive more value from existing investments by quickly and easily integrating with current business systems to leverage existing customer information.

 

*          Enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty by delivering real-time notifications via the customer’ channel – or channels – of choice.

 

*          Ensure that customers always have the latest account and service information.

 

*          Decrease costs by contacting customers proactively, reducing the need for incoming calls by up to 20 percent.

 

*          Increase revenue and improving agent morale by freeing up agents to focus on cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

 

*          Achieve ROI more quickly than with traditional outbound solutions, while reducing IVR variable costs by up to 20 percent.

 

 

 “Our solution provides a truly personalized customer experience,” says Ravi Narayanan, Convergys vice president of product management. “While other outbound offerings broadcast the same message to everyone, intelligent notifications can be tailored toward each individual – even down to the transaction level.”

 

To illustrate a leading grocery, pharmacy, and convenience retailer implemented Intelligent Notification to alert its customers when prescriptions are ready. After a successful pilot program, the retailer rolled out Intelligent Notification to all of its pharmacy locations, increasing its outbound prescription notifications from 50,000 to 330,000 per month and significantly reducing its incoming call volume.

 

 “Some might argue that a single contact center multichannel routing solution could do the same thing, but that is rarely the case,” blogged Sheila McGee-Smith, president, McGee-Smith Analytics, after seeing a DDS demonstration. “Web interactions are typically handled separately from voice. Live agent routing and IVR routing, while they can be combined, are in many cases still in siloed applications. And in-person interactions can also be run through DDS, something few systems today can include.” 

 

Recognizing that IVR and other such solutions may require customization, and that there may be new markets such tools can reach, Convergys has also introduced a new Developer Zone Web site. It is designed to help developers learn more about Convergys’ application development tools, such as its Eclipse-based Interaction Composer (IC). Interaction Composer’s capabilities will be further enhanced with the release of Intervoice Voice Portal 6.5 later this year.

 

Using this new site, developers can download IC, install it on their workstations, and immediately begin building intelligent voice and multimodal applications, giving them the opportunity to “test drive” the capabilities of the Intelligent Self-Service solution. The Developer Zone includes an Interaction Composer Cookbook and a user guide to help developers learn about the tool, as well as an online forum monitored by Convergys’ technical staff, where developers can share tips and techniques and recommend enhancements.

 

“With the Developer Zone, we are providing the ability to quickly and easily build innovative self-service applications that add value to every customer interaction, without the cost and expense usually associated with trying new technologies,” says Mike Betzer (News - Alert), Convergys’ president of relationship technology management.