Bringing IVR to the Mobile Environment
It’s also a mistake to see IVR as a single pathway along the transition to mobile. In conventional IVR systems, callers follow menu trees with their voices and everything is accomplished through that lone channel. Today’s smartphone users not only have multiple channels available to them, they’re accustomed to making those channels work together, and they do it on the fly. Two friends planning a dinner might send restaurants’ web links back and forth while chatting on their mobiles. People can snap photos on their phones and share them through their social media feeds and email without missing a beat.
“A key component to link mobile with voice and the overall customer experience is texting,” says Tom Farquhar, strategic account manager of computer-telephony integration (CTI) and IVR products at Enghouse Interactive, a provider of integrated contact center and self-service solutions in Phoenix. The addition of text messaging to IVR marries speed with convenience, both of which are driving factors for many mobile device users. “Sometimes people don’t need to be on the phone, they want something quick,” Farquhar explains. Users might not have the time or need to follow a detailed IVR tree. “If you can, send them a link through text, then if they need more information, they can click that link and get it,” Farquhar says. The text dimension allows self-service through IVR while improving the customer experience through the use of mobile’s expanded channel capabilities.
IVR Across Device Platforms
One conundrum platform developers face is that the mobile ecosystem has a sort of fragmentation about it. Two operating systems—Apple and Android—dominate the marketplace, and a few other platforms, like Windows Mobile and Linux, are also out there. Each of those could have a number of different versions active in the wild at any given time. Newer OS releases might not support older applications, and the opposite is also true, with older platforms sometimes proving incapable of handling the requirements for the newest apps.
But for IVR providers, implementing the technology as a native application within the mobile ecosystem could be a mistake. “In most industries, application adoption is dismal,” du Toit explains. “What are the odds you’ll download the app of a company before trying to resolve your issue?”
Very few people will go through the effort of putting an application on their devices just to speak with a customer service representative or ask a question about a product they’ve purchased. Rather than trying to push the boulder up the hill, du Toit says, “the right approach is a purely HTML5-based interface. It works whether you’re on iOS or Android, but even more importantly, you can run it on a website.”
This approach removes the complexities of trying to program for multiple OS environments and increases adoption because it doesn’t require users to download an app, he explains.
Leveraging an interpreter could also be an option. Gostl points to Java, which can run in multiple environments, from iOS to Windows and Linux. “If another operating system comes out, you have to write the interpreter for the new OS, not rewrite the application,” he explains.
The most expensive component in rewriting apps is often within the compliance and legal sectors. If developers can avoid those costs, it’s a big advantage. And though some interpreters and applications might convert perfectly because of the feature sets involved, Gostl says, “what you won’t do is go through the cost of redeveloping that application portion for more than one place.”
Because hardware is constantly getting faster, the conventional wisdom that says to avoid adding a layer between the app and the OS seems increasingly out of date, which makes interpreters a more viable option for helping IVRs jump into the mobile space.
Yet it’s true that a dedicated application is the better choice in some situations. “If I want to check my bank balance regularly, as a customer I want to download that app and have it on my device,” Farquhar says.