Contact Centers: How Interactive Voice Response Can Increase Customer Satisfaction& Retention

Catalog Success: You’ll often hear about customer frustration with getting stuck in a maze of menus when they really just want to talk to a live person. How does IVR help alleviate that frustration?
Knight: With speech, there are ways to create a dialogue with the customer. You can ask the customer an open-ended question, such as “What would you like on your pizza?” You then have an idea of what the answers will be. We use those likely answers to build a grammar for our recognition engine. There could be 25 different answers, and we can recognize all of them. And you can create prompting in the middle of that if there are problems, which helps make it more conversational. It’s not completely human-like, and there will be situations that live agents will have to handle. But at least those agents are handling just those issues that automation can’t cover.