Automatic Identification & IVR Systems In The Contact Center

Interactive Voice Response systems are an essential tool in the company’s contact center and can be considered as an added value of a more overall multichannel customer approach strategy. The growing quality required in the service offered through the contact center goes hand in hand with introducing various artificial intelligence applications in the customer approach, improving its effectiveness and performance, and allowing users to transition to the operator for any further needs.

This is an excellent case in which artificial intelligence supports companies in their relationships with people, guaranteeing significant advantages: voice bots and chatbots, for example, are highly technological solutions that have become part of everyday life and, for this reason, are perceived as accessible. This increasingly frequent presence among the available support methods makes them an essential tool in the multichannel strategy of “dialogue” between the company and people.

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IVR Systems, What They Are, And How They Work

IVR systems use artificial intelligence to talk to people: they identify the specific needs of those who contact the contact center, analyze the request, and provide an adequate response. Thanks to Automatic speech recognition, the voice bot, i.e., the “virtual assistant” that answers the call to the contact center, cannot only understand the request of the person who is calling but also identify it, thanks to a specific parameter.

This development allows further automation and speeds up the caller’s answering operation. In the design phase of an IVR system, it is essential to clearly define which response methods to keep in the hands of the operator and which instead to leave to be managed more effectively by autonomous AI systems. The very ability of IVR systems to “learn” also significantly affects this aspect.

Ingo IVR Systems: The Voice Bot That “Learns” And Saves Money

According to Ingo, a company specializing in business services for the digital transformation and re-engineering of customer experience and customer operations processes, thanks to automatic identification systems, it is possible to save from 30 seconds up to a minute per call, thus increasing the efficiency of the customer service and satisfaction.

“Bots are reliable, agile and high-performance tools. They can provide great support when they are well designed and properly maintained. They are often able to manage entire parts of the process, even complex ones, in complete autonomy. Bots are also able to learn over time to evolve their knowledge and to always provide users with adequate answers. This learning ability is also fundamental from a customer experience perspective.

The management of complexity demonstrates how AI allows all virtual assistance systems such as IVRs to not just be ‘automatons’ but, thanks to machine learning, activate widespread knowledge that allows bots to be trained on specific cases thanks to ‘use of Big Data” – explains Dario Panzeri, Automation Engineer at Ingo.

“However, these systems must not be thought of as valid solutions regardless of every situation. In our experience, the hybridization between automatic systems and human support amplifies the peculiarities of both parts and provides the best customer experience”.

IVR systems: an ally to deal with peaks of activity and extend availability

Therefore, an IVR system finds its perfect application when the company foresees that the voice bot can manage massive interactions simultaneously or must provide answers within well-structured processes. IVR systems are an essential tool in the company’s contact center and can be considered an added value of a more overall multichannel customer approach strategy.

An excellent example in this sense, and of the advantages of multichannel, was developed by Ingo with X-Cally, an omnichannel platform that integrates the different communication channels. “In being multifaceted and designed for multiple uses – specifies Dario Panzeri – Bots provide great added value in carrying out well-defined processes.

For example, voice bots are an excellent solution in case of specific processes such as verifying the shipping status of an order, managing reservations, dispatching technical assistance calls based on multiple criteria for identifying a faulty machine and, more generally, the provision of specific information such as that which is usually explained in the FAQs on the company website”.

Bots are also fundamental in all cases where it is necessary to identify a VIP user to provide him with a specific type of support, different from the standard one or to activate personalized parts of processes based on the customer who can self-identify through different methods (user code, PIN code, telephone number, etc.)

In this way, IVR systems can provide information quickly to customers, even at times when there is a high concentration of requests (for example, many orders to be verified due to the Christmas shopping boom) because the systems of AI do not suffer limitations in service due to the increase in traffic managed.

Similarly, IVR systems are effective when extending your contact center service by ensuring greater availability 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The IVR system, therefore, provides extended information coverage without increasing management costs and can, in any case, send the request to the operator, which is available only in necessary cases.

In any case, the possibility for people to always be able to count on a response from the contact center, both in the case of traffic peaks, avoiding long waits, and extended hourly availability, represents an excellent advantage for customer satisfaction.

IVR Systems, An Essential Piece In The Company’s Multichannel Strategy

IVR systems are a transversal solution: for large companies, for example, they allow any internal or external contact center to be supported in managing sudden volumes, defining an organized customer journey, and supporting internal users in receiving helpful information about the caller.

For smaller companies, IVR systems allow you to expand the coverage of your service, also providing linguistic support where there are insufficient resources with this type of skill internally. Furthermore, regardless of the reference sectors of the contact center, AI technology applied to IVR systems effectively responds to the contact center’s need for growth from a quantitative and qualitative point of view and fits perfectly into a company’s multichannel strategy. Business.

More generally, the application of AI is becoming increasingly popular: on the one hand, the market seems ready to welcome an ever-increasing use of technologies, and users are no longer confused by bots; on the other, the application of technologies in contact centers is becoming increasingly widespread and divided into different specializations.

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