Four Steps for Improving IVR-Customer Interactions

Why don’t companies want to make their IVRs more profitable?

A business process outsourcing (BPO) provider with 5,000 global agents was primarily focused on customer experience and contact center outsourcing for large companies. Like many in its industry, the BPO ran on very tight margins and wanted to move away from spending capital money. It preferred operational expenses because it billed its customers on a monthly usage basis (i.e., how many phone calls it took), so it desired to match its cost structure with its revenue structure. Having to pay money upfront with the hope that the customers would use the system would not benefit the BPO; instead, it desired for its underlying technology and business costs to be paid when its clients made payments. For this reason, an “As-a-Service” model best suited the BPO from a financial and technology perspective.

More than ever, business leaders are focusing on how to optimize the customer experience they’re delivering. Gartner studies indicate that 89% of companies plan to compete primarily on customer experience. Optimization always starts with understanding and measuring the customer experiences you’re currently delivering. The only way to do that accurately is via technology solutions that can automatically mine and compile the wealth of unstructured customer interactions data hidden in Call Recordings, IVR Logs, and so on.

While voice authentication is now a hot topic, it is not a brand-new concept. Traditionally, voice authentication was used purely as a way to replace a user’s password. It was a very manual process to establish your voice password (today, we’d call that “active enrollment”), and you were limited to very specific ways of using it (typically a challenge-response model).

At ConvergeOne, every collaboration engagement follows the WAVES Methodology. The first step is a Workshop that helps our customers take an “outside-in” view of their environment. In other words, the Workshop allows our customers to first view the expectations from the end user’s point of view (the “outside”) and subsequently consider the technology’s capabilities (the “in”) being provided to meet the end user’s expectations. This outside-in approach works equally well for all user-facing services like customer experience (CX) and unified communications (UC).

In a previous blog post, we shared how organizations must move toward a customer-centric approach, with a focus on the customer journey as a strategic capability. How, specifically, can you do that? Here are five steps to follow to ensure you find and keep the right customers.

In a previous post, we shared that organizations today need to live and breathe customer-centric values, where Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, and IT collaborate to give customers the best, most seamless experience. Today’s customers have endless options, which means they will not hesitate to move on to a competitor after suffering through a bad experience with a company. Creating a seamless and exceptional experience is the only way to build truly loyal customers who can grow into brand advocates.

At ConvergeOne, WAVES is our proprietary Methodology that guides each and every one of our collaboration engagements. WAVES is an acronym, with each letter representing a specific phase of the methodology. Each phase provides a specific contribution to the final outcome, which is a recommended solution that is tailored to the customer’s business and technology needs. The WAVES phases, which must be executed in order, are:

What is a Connector? By definition, it is “a thing that links two or more things together.” In the telecommunications sector, that can mean a multitude of things. For the purposes of this blog post, I will be talking about ConvergeOne Advanced Services (C1AS) and the benefits of integrating Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms with Telephony platforms.

Do you have omnichannel projects that just aren’t moving along as fast as you think they should? What are the hurdles getting in your way? I’ve yet to find a scenario where it’s the technology that’s slowing things down. Don’t get me wrong, omnichannel isn’t easy. It’s a very different approach to customer contact than traditional call centers or even multichannel contact centers. Omnichannel is all about customizing the journey of the person (or thing) trying to interact with your business. First we need to understand what the customer journey actually looks like. This is often a lot harder than it sounds. Most people in a company know their little piece of the customer journey, but very few can articulate the details of the full, beginning-to-end journey. This often requires a lot of exploration, business-level interviews, multi-disciplinary teams, and documentation.