Introduction
As traditional, resource-heavy interactive voice response (IVR) systems reach their end of life, contact centre operators have a unique opportunity to enhance the often cumbersome customer experience (CX) associated with outdated systems by adopting a cloud-based IVR modernisation strategy. Over the years, IVR systems have become essential for automating initial customer engagement using voice prompts and touch-tone inputs. However, legacy IVR systems generally offer limited self-service options, depending on lengthy menus and complicated navigation via voice prompts, which can frustrate callers and lead to extended wait times. These cumbersome interactions can negatively affect customer experiences, especially as expectations for swift and efficient interactions across preferred channels continue to rise. Shifting customer demands also necessitate increased personalisation at every touchpoint.
Amazon Connect is a cloud-based contact center solution that provides advanced features for modernising IVR systems. This blog post will delve into how adopting cloud-based IVR modernisation can transform customer experience in contact centres, outlining the benefits, technologies, and strategies involved in this transition.
A Cloud Solution to IVR Modernisation
While IVR modernisation is pivotal for overcoming the challenges posed by legacy systems, the difficulty of integrating modern digital channels into these outdated systems makes finding solutions increasingly difficult, rendering them obsolete as contact centre technology evolves rapidly. By adopting a cloud-based IVR system in a hosted environment like Amazon Web Services (AWS), contact centre operators gain access to a plethora of capabilities and integration opportunities that drive IVR modernisation.
The rewards of this investment include improved customer satisfaction and loyalty, decreased call handling times and operational costs, enhanced first-call resolution rates, and the capacity to gather more data and analytics for ongoing improvements. These benefits stem from an organisation’s ability to leverage advanced modern technologies when implementing a cloud-based IVR modernisation strategy.
Access Advanced Capabilities and Technologies
Innovative technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) can greatly enhance the performance of contact centre and customer experience (CX) solutions. One of the primary advantages is refined customer routing and problem-solving. Agile IVR systems utilise personal data and interaction histories to route callers more effectively, ensuring more satisfactory outcomes from each interaction.
Integrating advanced natural language processing (NLP) solutions with generative AI allows for more personalised customer interactions. These systems comprehend the intent and context of customer inquiries more effectively, enabling more natural, conversational engagements. This significantly enhances CX compared to traditional menu-driven IVR systems. With these capabilities implemented, automated journey mapping can direct customers to the appropriate self-service channel or escalate their call to the most relevant agent. By utilizing personal information and past interactions, these solutions can prioritise high-value customers, ensuring they receive the right level of attention and service.
In addition to routing, AI-powered capabilities facilitate more efficient customer self-service. Chatbots and other digital channels infused with generative AI can understand various languages and dialects, thereby expanding the accessibility and effectiveness of these automated support options. This helps keep simpler inquiries away from live agents, enhancing overall operational efficiency.
Partnering for IVR Modernisation Success
Before embarking on any IVR modernisation journey, operators must conduct a thorough assessment of their current system, focusing on existing data sets and identifying pain points. It is also essential to surface customer journeys to understand the predominant types of demand and define which journeys should be fully automated and which should not be automated at all.
This differentiation is crucial because automating the wrong process can detrimentally impact CX, while automating the right ones can yield significant return on investment (ROI) and other benefits. This is where the right technology partner can add considerable value.
The Connect Advantage
This section provides an overview of Connect, an AWS Partner, and should not be confused with Amazon Connect. An experienced service provider like Connect, proficient in contact centre, CX, and AI domains, can help to simplify the complex aspects of IVR modernisation. Using advanced AI technology, Connect evaluates and analyses current IVR flows and scripts to identify inefficiencies and provide actionable recommendations to optimise performance. With these tailored insights, Connect leverages its partnerships with technology providers like Amazon Connect, an AWS Advanced Tier partner, to implement the most suitable solutions to address identified challenges.
The implementation takes the form of a phased rollout migration, using either a value-driven or time-driven approach. A value-driven approach is ideal for large, complex deployments. It begins with a discovery stage, analysing mined utterances from existing call recordings, tagging intent and grammar files, followed by cleaning and optimising the data for customer journey mapping, which helps derive data insights and create phrases for intent mapping.
The migration phase involves migrating successful elements and reworking others, with continuous testing and tuning. The time-driven approach follows a lift-and-shift format, guided by the suitability of the customer’s current voice journeys and their reusability, as well as the timeline for completion. For instance, Connect can lift and shift a natural language platform like Nuance to Amazon Connect, integrating business applications to support self-service journeys if necessary. Ongoing testing also follows the migration.
Continual Optimisation for Sustained Innovation
Ongoing testing is a vital element in any IVR modernisation strategy, driving continual optimisation. This process aims to update the IVR system’s dictionary with new information regarding the latest product releases or updates that customers use because businesses typically change faster than the technology they employ. Hence, companies need to continually optimise and train the language models used in their customer-focused IVR solutions.
Amazon Connect facilitates easy training and optimisation of these IVR solutions, ensuring the system comprehends the different contexts related to a company’s ever-evolving product mix and the language surrounding these updates. Organisations can integrate the right mix of tools and features needed to create a robust and comprehensive solution that achieves their IVR modernisation strategy and CX goals.
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Location
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