Some folks in the contact center industry would have you believe that IVR technology is dead. Perhaps you agree, based on your own high opt-out rates and low customer satisfaction scores. In reality, the saying couldn’t be further from the truth. Advancements in IVR are ensuring the technology’s role in the modern contact center.

The customer service industry has evolved rapidly over the last ten years or so, and much of the industry’s attention has been on the shiny and new: omnichannel, personalization, web self-service and most recently, Artificial Intelligence. But this same innovation applies to IVR. Providers have evolved their offerings, delivering new features and capabilities that help address current customer service trends. Here are some of the recent advancements in IVR technology that could benefit your contact center – and your customers.

Central context store

Now you can put all that customer data you collect to good use. Modern IVRs allow you to execute sophisticated rules against a context store to determine how to handle specific calls. The context store is a central data repository that stores recent customer interaction steps/actions from multiple channels. These steps/actions are granular in time and detail and allow you to make just in time decisions based on the customer’s past interactions and behavior.

New ways to interact with the IVR

Say goodbye to numeric menu options. Customers today can engage with the IVR in a more intuitive and natural way. Speech recognition has advanced to the extent that conversational IVR is a viable option, and visual IVR allows customers to engage through a graphical interface on their mobile device.

Fraud prevention capabilities

Telephony-based fraud remains a real risk for contact centers, but call detail records hold valuable clues that can help prevent fraud – if you can find them. A modern IVR can analyze call detail records based on rules and flag details that are indicative of suspicious or fraudulent activity.

Analytic dashboards

The ability to measure key performance indicators (KPIs) like call abandonment and IVR containment are key to improving customer satisfaction scores. After all, how do you know what to fix if you don’t know what’s broken? Today’s IVR solutions not only provide analytics pertaining to IVR utilization, they also enable you to drill down into specific IVR interactions to perform root cause analysis and improve upon those KPIs.

Flexible options

Contact centers today have more options for their IVR than ever before. Advanced integration capabilities mean that you no longer have to use your ACD provider’s IVR offering. Instead, you can use (and integrate) any IVR that best fits your needs. You also have additional deployment options that can help reduce costs. Secure cloud hosting eliminates the capital expense of running an IVR on-premises while reducing operational expenses associated with ongoing management of the technology.

With these advancements in IVR, the question that remains isn’t whether IVR is dead – but whether your IVR is dead. If your IVR technology is missing any of these features or capabilities, it may be time to replace. Would you like to learn more?  Contact us today.