Strong Growth Expected in the IVR Market
Research firm MarketsandMarkets has valued the current interactive voice response (IVR) systems market at $3.73 billion and expects it to reach $5.54 billion by 2023, growing at a compound annual rate of 6.83 percent.
The firm attributes the growth of the IVR market to increasing integration of advanced technologies and a rise in cloud-based services. It singles out natural language processing (NLP) as one of the leading technology advances that has been gaining increased adoption in the past decade. NLP, the firm says in its "Interactive Voice Response Market by Technology (Touch-Tone and Speech), Deployment (Cloud and On-Premises), Vertical (BFSI, Pharma and Healthcare, ITES), Organization Size, Solution, Service, And Geography - Global Forecast to 2023" report, has helped in developing conversational systems. Using NLP technology, the IVR solutions have been designed to be smarter, it concluded.
NLP is also helping to reduce the amount of time consumers need to spend to get queries resolved and to reduce the call duration, which, in turn, helps organizations achieve higher cost optimization, according to the report.
Speech-based technology also helps in the eradication of complex DTMF commands, eliminating the need for limited 10-digit keypad inputs, MarketsandMarkets says.
IVR analytics is also playing an essential role in fueling growth, it says, helping companies capture, track, and evaluate the entire call experience and identify the root cause of common drop-off points and misunderstood menus and prompts.
MarketsandMarkets' research also found that North America holds the largest share of the IVR market in 2016, fueled largely by a growing number of applications in the financial services, pharmaceutical and healthcare, government, and education sectors, though Asia-Pacific is likely to see the fastest growth of all regions.
The report identies NICE-inContact, Nuance Communications, Convergys, Avaya, Cisco Systems, AT&T, West, Genesys, Verizon Communications, and 24/7 as the key industry players in the U.S. market.