Businesses love IVR. It helps them to avoid direct interaction with customers and save on employee salaries. Customers hate IVR because the IVR does not let them talk with a person to discuss their specific issue. However, IVRs are morphing into something more user-friendly. The way things are going in the IVR world there will come a time when customers will prefer IVR over agents.
Visual IVR
Visual IVR should go mainstream in 2020. Most people use a smartphone with a touch screen so there is little point in offering them audio options. More businesses should adopt IVR solutions that have the visual facility. A user can view the menu-tree structure and straightaway jump to the option of his choice rather than navigating the keypress maze. But then, with AI and tight CRM integration, you can have first key-press interaction too.
AI speech
AI has progressed to a level where natural language processing and conversational bots are now possible so it is no surprise if you have IVR systems in 2020 that give you near-human experience with a bot that calls up records from the CRM, recognizes language and follows the conversation topic just like an agent would do. Talk of speech and communications and there is no reason for the IVR to be limited as a self-service tool. It can work for outbound campaigns too. On the other side, there are IVR solutions that make use of recordings by human voices instead of the machine text to speech translator and that feature adds a welcome human touch.
Outbound campaigns
IVR solutions are progressing to a level where they integrate CRM, SMS broadcast and voice broadcast. Use IVR software with this capability and you should be able to program an outbound campaign using SMS or voice broadcast, convert into various languages and send out messages. The IVR handles responses too and an agent steps in for closure of leads.
Industry-specific IVR solutions
IVR cannot be a one-size-fits-all application and the focus will be on custom IVR solutions for each industry type and for each purpose. For instance, hotels will need specific hotel IVRs, entertainment and travel will find ticket booking IVR suited to their purpose and healthcare will adopt IVR that can be dynamically configured for their services.
Customer success is a more important metric in IVR and that is what IVR developers aim at in today’s competitive world. Customer success depends on the features and usability of the system and how well it is developed. A good solution is likely to be expensive so it is likely that IVR as a service will flourish. IVR users get the best IVR software that assures customer success and IVR developers are guaranteed steady revenue flows.