Evolved IVR, Customer Experience and customer satisfaction

Dario Panzeri, Ingo's automation engineer, spoke to CXNow on how to manage a customer service thanks to advanced IVR solutions.

Manage customer service with an IVR solution

To Customer eXperience Nowan event staged on May 24th at Le Village by CA in Milan, there it is focus on the role of customer experience within companies and, providing an overview of the latest technological innovations, the importance of developing a culture in this area was discussed.

CXNow, the Italian reference event for customer experience, employee experience and service experience, saw the participation of Dario Panzeri, Ingo automation engineer, who spoke on how to manage a customer service thanks to advanced IVR solutions.

The evolution of IVR and the improvement of the customer experience

IVR stands for Interactive Voice Response:interactive voice response, which is a technology that allows customers to interact with a telephone systemornico through a voice menu that can be configured according to the specific needs of a company. IVRs are in fact a consolidated technology and with which the user has become familiar. Their main use over the years it iswas to help companies and their customer services to differentiate traffic in order to provide accurate answers based on the skills of the operators.

With time, they have become a powerful one ally in providing information routinely via recorded messages and tocope of large volumes of calls. The latest evolutions have made them an even more performing tool. Through speech recognition systems allow the customer to speak in natural language, they recognize it thanks to the interfacing with the main CRM systems, they verify his needs through artificial intelligence And they respond directly to theHis request managing the end-to-end process.

In this way, a direct response to the consumer’s need is provided, exponentially improving the customer experience and offering a different user experience than the traditional one. The advanced IVR makes it possible to support service levels at peak times , thus freeing up resources with high added value for the management of more complex activities.There are several scenarios that open up thanks to the introduction of anadvanced IVR andthatallow for improve the customer experience:

• Automatic management of dispositive actions: such as checking the status of an order, checking the balance of the loyalty card points, etc.
• Automatic information management: information data on procedures, general notices, FAQs, train timetables, traffic etc.
• Support for data entry via tone keypad or voice recognition.
• Automatic management of availability.

How to make an advanced IVR? What are the steps to follow?

In order to create an advanced and truly efficient IVR it is important to carry out evaluations and act according to the steps.

• Carry out an AS-IS scenario analysis, evaluating the current customer journey.
• Evaluate which type of journey you want to create and redesign.
• Understand the type of customer approach, evaluate his language and his satisfaction.
• Verify technologies: licenses, infrastructures, clouds, integrations with CRM.

• Agile design with bot training.
• Always guarantee a way-out on an operator, in order to avoid creating a hostile path and therefore a negative customer experience.
• Maintenance.

When is it convenient to use the advanced IVR? The efficiency parameters

Automation is more effective both from a technical and economic point of view when there are volumes (critical mass), the perimeter is very limited (recurrence) and when the user does not consider it essential to receive a human comparison in the first instance. The organization benefits from this when it is very segmented / structured vertically.

The objectives that can be set are different: to reduce the calls handled by the operators, to offer the customer a better experience, to lower the average response time, to extend the hours of the service, to bring savings. To measure the efficiency of an IVR some parameters can be taken into consideration:

• Absorption of calls managed by an automaton compared to those managed by an operator, to be sure that the user likes this type of tools.
• Rate of unacknowledged requests. The service evolves, there may be new cases and new requests, so it must always be kept under control.
• NPS: Net Promoter Score, a tool that measures customer satisfaction.
• FOC, or the percentage of users who hang up.

The new workers born to follow IVR solutions

Lor development from new tools has allowed the growth of new professional figures related to world of BOT development, their maintenance and coordination of automation processes. It can include bot developers and bot trainers (who train and develop bots), data scientists and data visualization experts (work on data, allowing visualizations and analyzes), specific IT figures and project managers who work in an agile context.