Battle of the IVR Designs: Conversational Versus Phone Trees
customer by the time [he or she] gets to an agent. If your phone tree has gotten too deep and your customers are often getting long wait times, that justifies a conversational system."
It's also important to do a deep dive and collect data to better understand why your customers are calling and how they are expressing what they want. Only then can you determine whether or not your company is actually providing it.
"You must get the company that desires this technology to carefully articulate the scope of the problem that it's trying to solve," Scholz says. "Get the business to precisely define what the task is that they want callers to interact with. If it's a very large or complex task, then the cost for doing so goes up precipitously. If it's a fairly modest task, such as some banking applications, then that is reasonable to do and does not require extensive effort."
Skrbina suggests that IVR design considerations take into account other departments in addition to the contact center, and maintains that companies are much more successful when marketing or branding is part of the project. "For a long time, IVRs were kind of stuck in the closet somewhere, and the people in customer service and IT would cobble these things together," she says. "What we're seeing today is the focus on customer experience. These are becoming more of a corporate initiative with marketing and branding teams."
From a technical point of view, one of the things required to build a natural language system correctly is that companies understand what their callers are saying on the phone. Pelland says that when his team is working with a client, the team will typically put in a false front end to an IVR so that literally everyone who calls in hears "How may I help you?" "Customers will say what they want to do, and we collect that and save it on a hard drive," Pelland explains. "We can get a thousand utterances from customers saying, 'I have a tech support problem,' which can be 'I need to speak to tech support,' and all the different ways people can say 'I have a problem.' That's captured, and you use the real-world data to build an engine," he says.
Pelland acknowledges that a new conversational system may take time for customers to get used to, and they may be inconvenienced at first because they may face extra questions while the system is capturing data. Because of this initial discomfort, Pelland says that companies should not be tempted to rush into implementing a conversational system. "I've seen people try to shortcut that, and the end result is atrocious," he says. "If someone calls in with something that the businesspeople didn't think of and it doesn't get recognized, you get a horrible experience."
The Outlook for Conversational Design
While conversational design may still be in its infancy, Skrbina points out that it will also become a big differentiator for companies. Despite being in different verticals, companies are no longer comparing themselves on an apples-to-apples basis, but on an apples-to-oranges level.
"What's changed is how people view their competition," she says. "It's no longer the norm for credit card companies to compare [their service] to the service of other credit card companies. Because consumers have so many digital relationships, a credit card company now has to look at customer service in utilities or in an airline and has to strive to meet that bar [of service]."
To be sure, conversational design offers a host of benefits, and experts believe that the technology will become a necessity. "Any company that has a significant amount of customer interaction is going to need to go conversational," Meisel says.
"Conversational design will be expected because you're going to see a lot of competition between Apple, Google, and Microsoft that will call attention to the natural language area," he says. "You can't [serve] millions of people at once except through automation."
Staff Writer Michele Masterson can be reached at mmasterson@infotoday.com.
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