Can Visual IVRs Shift Popular Opinion in Speech Tech’s Favor?
Zappix
For enterprises that are concerned with keeping the management costs for their visual IVR low, and that hope to keep it in-house and nimble, there is Zappix. Founded in 2011, Zappix also focuses on converting its client’s IVRs into visual IVRs, with the added incentive that the solution can then be implemented as a Web or native phone application that can move seamlessly between channels.
In addition, Zappix allows the client to show “visual ads” to the end users while they interact with the visual IVR.
“I am sensitive to the word ‘ad,’ since the client can already assume that the end user is interested in their products or service,” says Gal Steinberg, Zappix vice president of marketing. He goes on to describe how Zappix “ads” allow the end user to click through to context-sensitive incentives and information defined by the client, all without leaving the IVR session. “What these clickable promotions are particularly good at is emphasizing other services that a client offers in a way and time when it will be most attractive to their customers.”
Smaller or more frugal companies looking to put their stamp on a visual or mobile customer service solution (perhaps without investing in the creation and maintenance of a dedicated mobile app) might find Zappix a boon. “Zappix is completely brandable,” Steinberg states cheerily. “And our clients are able to make edits and additions to the scripts and actions for their visual IVRs on their own. Everything has a simple GUI. Our clients can define how things are synced with IVRs they already have.”
When asked for his opinion about the place of visual IVR in the new CRM climate, Steinberg comments, “A lot of multichannel was built into silos, and those silos don’t work well with other silos,” pointing out the limited thinking that sometimes holds clients back when creating a visual IVR. “There are usually a lot of things that the business can do that aren’t built into the old IVR—claim tickets, reports, forms. Things the phone-based IVR couldn’t do. It’s very useful to think beyond just what your old menus were capable of.”
Looking Ahead
Steinberg’s is a sentiment echoed by Forrester Research vice president and principal analyst Art Schoeller, who explains why larger CRM providers have not leapt to offer visual IVR solutions.
“Can businesses like Genesys and Cisco do visual IVR? Yes they can,” Schoeller says. “But it’s important to note that doing so would engender an organizational split for them. What I’ve sometimes seen is that businesses that have already produced polished solutions in the mobile space—such as dedicated mobile applications—when they try to add visual IVR, there’s a real danger of the solution falling short and just getting subsumed as a way to push traffic to the mobile app, where voice response is rarely offered. Visual IVR can sometimes mean the IVR is lobbying companies to become the back end for the mobile app completely.”
This is not to say that large companies are not pursuing multichannel products that incorporate visual capabilities into CRM solutions. Verizon is currently at work on a “hybrid environment,” according to Tom Smith, the company’s senior manager of customer experience and innovation, and such an environment will offer, he hopes, “mobile customer care, better self-service, seamless transition to agent-assisted transactions, and a two-way visual interface.” While no specific timetable is available, Smith says that the suite could be expected in the near future.
So looking ahead, where does this leave speech engagement, with so many options primed to disrupt the primacy of traditional, automated-speech IVR?
“We have been flat, so far as natural-language adoption is concerned,” says Schoeller. “A lot of the speech tech that is pushing the envelope these days is invested in a completely different business model. Siri is a value incentive for Apple. Cortona is a value incentive for Microsoft. Echo is a value incentive for Amazon. These are very expensive ecosystems tied to business concerns with much larger margins. I doubt that we’ll see any advancement in IVR in terms of speech—artificial intelligence and natural language understanding and machine learning can get very expensive in a way customer service is just not prioritized. However, the findings of our Forrester report tell the story—there will continue to be a place for speech technology in IVR, whether it moves to visual IVR or not. People are still using those channels to access customer service, and still expect them.”
Tye Pemberton is a freelance writer based in Linwood, N.J. He can be reached at tyepemberton@gmail.com.