CIO Leadership Briefing Deploying Visual IVR to Drive a Superior Customer Experience A Q&A with Keith Ward, Chief Technology Officer
Visual IVR Keith Ward consults with hundreds of large enterprise and Telco companies on their call center needs, next generation IVR, speech solutions and the web services infrastructures that will drive new customer and self-service applications. He is a highly respected commentator on social media and its deployment within the contact center. He has been involved in many projects that helped shape the industry, including the text-based precursor to the World Wide Web and a ground breaking speech IVR deployment at Charles Schwab. Recently, Ken Carson, a Principal Technology Analyst with The Edenfield Group sat down with Keith to talk about Visual IVR. Keith addresses issues such as how and why Visual IVR can be deployed to create a superior customer experience for one of the fastest growing customer segments. Keith also addresses which applications within the contact center are ideally suited for Visual IVR, cost-benefit considerations for enterprises and a range of technical and business topics of interest to IT Leaders and call center managers. What is the state of Visual IVR technology and why is it important to enterprises? There s a huge proliferation of smart phone and mobile devices. According to a recent survey by Com- Score, the number of US smart phone users surpassed 100 million this year. Globally, the number of feature and mobile phones combined is equal to the world s population. So there is a tremendous amount of capability sitting out there on these devices. Combine that with the fact that approximately half the world s population is under 30 years old. Most of those folks prefer texting and messaging rather than getting on a phone call and having a voice based interaction. So it s imperative that enterprises start looking at other ways to interact with this younger generation outside of the traditional voice and contact center capabilities. Visual IVR is one of those first stepping stones to providing another channel, on top of an existing technology for that younger generation who would rather interact with their smart phone or feature phone as opposed to calling an 800 number. The whole idea of Visual IVR is to expand upon the already existing applications, connectivity, business logic and capabilities that have been built up within the enterprise over the last 10+ years in an IVR environment. What Visual IVR allows you to do is layer on top of that a visual element to have a text based or mobile application based interaction that utilizes the capabilities of an existing IVR system. It is important to note that with Visual IVR you are leveraging the existing IVR back-end. For example, the routing capabilities of a traditional IVR system and the underlying routing (CTI) to Agents, etc. are utilized to help a customer reach a live agent without the customer having to re-enter data once they reach that agent. Another trend worth noting is that many companies today are trying to build customer service capabilities into their mobile applications. When companies roll their own mobile applications, it is critical that those applications integrate with and leverage their existing business intelligence as well. 2 P a g e
Not doing so can create frustration for a customer who has to dial an 800 number and re-enter information. Customer expectations for ease of use on mobile apps are very high and failure to meet those expectations can have negative consequences. When designed and implemented well, Visual IVR creates a new touch point, a new modality for customers to interact outside the voice channel but still utilize the capabilities that were built very specifically for voice. What technology challenges do IT leaders and contact center managers face in deploying Visual IVR? Probably the number one technology hurdle is hopefully something that enterprises have already been through and that is the migration from legacy IVR systems to open standards based systems such as VoiceXML. When an organization makes that migration from legacy to VoiceXML they are creating the web services, interaction layer and business intelligence that are also required to extend to Visual IVR. If they have not made that migration, then it s a matter of sitting down with them to talk about the technology roadmap to move to open standards. Assuming an enterprise has completed that migration, what do you advise as the most appropriate applications for Visual IVR? The most logical choices are voice applications that are particularly complex. That would include any applications that have a long menu tree, where many options need to be presented and are sometimes very necessary to drive a very particular interaction. The advantage of a Visual IVR environment is that you don t need to ask a primary question, a secondary question and a tertiary question, all three can be displayed as a multiple choice or a fill in the blank on a page. So a customer can simply fill in a few pieces of information, hit submit and they can be moved directly to a decision point. So an application that requires a lot of Q&A with a customer translates very well to Visual IVR because we can aggregate that to a single page or two instead of having to walk them through that very synchronous process on the phone. In the background we re filling in the blanks, the IVR is progressing through, but the customer feels like they only had to fill in some information and hit submit. That improves the customer experience dramatically. Even though they may have spent 3 or 4 minutes, the customer feels as though they only had to enter some information, hit submit once or twice and they have a decision. They feel much more positively about the whole interaction with that enterprise. How do you balance the cost of deploying Visual IVR with creating a great customer experience? I truly believe that Visual IVR provides a better customer experience. People are able absorb more information visually and are able to process that information more efficiently than if they listen to a long series of questions. Best practices in traditional IVR are that we never present more than 4 or 5 options on a given menu tree. 3 P a g e
With Visual IVR you can present many more options because people don t lose track of them. So right off the bat, you re providing a better customer experience. Secondly, you are leveraging existing technology and infrastructure so you have a very low cost way to drive a much better customer experience. The cost of building out Visual IVR capability is an incremental cost relative to building an IVR system. Much of the cost is already depreciating in the applications, the connectivity, the infrastructure and the business intelligence in the voice IVR. Equally important is that the Gen-Y customer does not want to call an 800 number and talk to an enterprise. Their view of great customer service is that they want to be able to text or otherwise interact from their phone or mobile device. Perhaps they want to start an interaction and come back to it later. Increasingly, they will only do business with enterprises that provide that type of channel for them. Given the relatively low cost and high perceived value for customers, what s holding back the deployment of Visual IVR? The technology and proliferation of devices to utilize this technology is relatively new. There are as many definitions of Visual IVR and a wide variety of capabilities that can be driven by Visual IVR. Many companies are currently focused on their mobile strategies so they are looking at mobile applications. I m very enthusiastic about mobile applications. However, from a holistic point of view, mobile applications are a new application, a new capability that needs to be sized, thought through and maintained within the enterprise. Whereas Visual IVR represents an interim step that companies can deploy right now to deliver similar value to those smart phone and feature phone customers at a fraction of the price. Many companies are simply not aware yet that there is a middle ground, a next step that can be taken without a lot of cost. I m frankly quite surprised that so few enterprises are aware that they can leverage existing infrastructures and an existing application layers to drive these kinds of visual interactions. What are the most important business benefits that accrue from deploying Visual IVR? By far, the biggest business benefit is the customer experience. It s twofold in the sense that Visual IVR can drive a far better customer experience than what can be done with just a voice application. It s also that so many customers of the future just won t want to deal with a voice interaction. They are a large and growing segment of the population and companies need to create alternative methods for them to access self service. So there needs to be another modality by which these customers can interact with an enterprise. 4 P a g e
What does the future look like for Visual IVR? Over the near term, it may be that Visual IVR can largely replace speech enabled IVR systems. The business benefits of being able to visually and intuitively present user choices for complex applications are compelling. Speech enabled applications require expensive, enterprise-class speech recognition technology. There are additional costs for highly experienced developers to tune and maintain those speech applications. As smart phone proliferation increases, the speech engines will reside on the phone. Over the longer term, I believe that Visual IVR, mobile applications and even voice have a life span. I don t know if that s 5 or 10 years down the road. Eventually every enterprise will have a finely honed WebApp (web-based application) and that will be the way that people interact with companies. You will simply navigate to a WebApp or have that WebApp s link on your device and that will be the future for self service. Visual IVR, mobile apps and voice are important as bridging technologies in order to allow customers to interact with you how they so choose, thus keeping them happy. You want to be perceived as an enterprise that cares about the customer service interaction you re having with them. About PSS Help PSS can initially assess the performance of an existing call center IVR solution then create a strategic plan and technology roadmap that leads to dramatically improving the customer experience while also maximizing the return on investment for the applications and technologies. As highly specialized systems integrators and IVR solutions experts, PSS can design and deliver fully integrated communication solutions. Those solutions help contact centers become true multi-media centers to meet the rapidly accelerating customer demand for a superior customer experience, across all channels. PSS can also optimize and support both platform and applications until the time comes to move to next gen solutions. PSS is the choice of some of the world s most admired enterprises. PSS works with 150 corporations, across 5 continents, in 19 countries. We solve problems that matter to our customers, keep our promises and make it easy to renew service contracts. Our customer repeat business rate is 99%. Corporate Headquarters 7172 Regional Street #431, Dublin, CA 94568 T: 925-208-2450 or 800-506-7119 Fax: 888-455-2285 UK Headquarters The Old Saw Mill, Harvest Hill Lane, Coventry, CV5 9DD www.psshelp.com 5 P a g e