Customers today expect more – they expect quicker problem solving, customised experiences, and successful self-service. Despite the fact that conventional IVR systems are designed to provide self-service via phone, minimise call frequency, and improve agent efficiency, these objectives are rarely achieved. For escalations, conflicts, and complicated problems, customers typically prefer phone-based experiences.
Customers are often confused by conventional IVR implementations that use touch-tone and dialog-based instructions, complicated routing, and convoluted navigation menus. As a consequence, calls are diverted to live operators, resulting in higher operating costs and reduced efficiency.
As a result, companies must find effective ways to resolve consumer concerns while simultaneously addressing the challenges of conventional IVRs. So what’s the answer? An IVR that talks back to you! A Conversational IVR.
Conversational IVRs, which are created by conversational AI companies, provide a unique voice-based and hands-free solution in which consumers can communicate using natural language rather than selecting options from a long static menu like conventional IVRs. With the assistance of Natural Language Understanding, conversational IVR systems can now predict the caller’s needs and identify the context of a conversation (NLU).
Conversational IVR can understand both the meaning and the reasoning of the issue thanks to automated speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU) engines. By removing detours and inefficient pathways to resolution, getting the customer’s intent right reduces handling times.
Benefits Of Conversational IVR
Streamlined Operational Costs
It’s critical for businesses to cut contact centre costs while maintaining a high level of customer service. In many ways, conversational and intelligent IVR systems have been critical to cost-cutting.
One way is to reduce contact centre costs by increasing call resolution and deflection rates. In addition, conversational IVR encourages improved agent utilisation, which lowers labour costs.
Reduce Contact Center Call Volume
Traditional IVRs are ineffective at meeting consumers’ needs because they rely on list-based menus. After walking the caller through a long list of choices, they may decide not to address the problem at all. Calls are routed to live agents for resolution in this situation.
Customers will directly speak about their problem in natural language with conversational IVRs, and the system would recommend the best possible solution. This reduces the number of times users would try to resolve a problem, decreasing the volume of calls to the contact centre.
Agent Skill Based Routing
Customers are forced to contact human agents due to the ineffectiveness of classical IVRs in resolving problems. With more calls piling up, agents would be unable to manage the high volume of calls, resulting in call abandonment, lengthy wait and handling times, and reduced productivity.
Customers may be successfully involved via the IVR system without having to connect to an agent, unless in exceptional circumstances. This gives agents more time to focus on key problems that require human intervention and to settle issues definitively, resulting in increased agent productivity.
Adapting to customer behaviour requirements
A Conversational IVR created by conversational AI companies should be able to create their own database and intelligence based on customer interactions, thanks to AI and machine learning. This aids them in enhancing their overall ability to resolve customer concerns.
This information is then used in subsequent interactions to respond to the customer’s behaviour and needs as effectively as possible.
Higher Resolution Rates For Better Sales performance scores
Conversational IVRs should route calls to agents who are better suited to settle unique problems rather than routing calls to the first available agent because they can detect complicated requests. This results in a higher rate of customer concerns being resolved and also enhancing the customer experience.
Conclusion
Customers are expecting more agile, faster, and easier ways to settle their concerns, so intelligent IVR systems are becoming increasingly important in improving and modernising customer service. Many firms will deploy conversational IVR systems in the coming years to reduce costs, increase agent efficiency, and increase customer experience.
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