Artificial Intelligence in IVR: A Step Towards Faster Customer Services

With an increase in demand for accessible and efficient customer services, augmenting AI with IVR has become an imperative step to ensure improved customer satisfaction. 

Whenever a call is made to the customer care center, be it while having queries regarding a particular product or while asking about different services offered by the bank, the customer can hear a monotonous incessant response such as "Your call is on waiting, please hold the line", or "We have registered your request, we will connect you to an executive shortly."

This recurrent voice, with monotony in its frequency, is Interactive Voice Response(IVR), which is used in every sector for tending to the needs of the customer. IVR is a telephonic catalog through which the companies register the customer's queries by identifying, segmenting, and directly connecting the customer to an executive who can attend their queries. 

Nonetheless, due to its superfluous technology often the traditional IVRs are unable to comprehend the requests made by customers or intent behind the call. 

That's why most of the customers are now displaying dissatisfaction with the services provided through IVR. The extended time taken by the IVRs to connect to a customer care executive has also become exhausting for customers.

A research report suggests that an estimated 35% of customers want to substitute a more reliable option, because of poor experience with IVRs. Thus for advanced customer satisfaction, the introduction of conversational AI to IVR can be a game-changer for sectors that are administered by attending customer services, like Telecommunication.

What is Conversational AI?

The conversational AI refers to the use of AI-based technology such as apps, speech-based assistants, or chatbots for automating communication with the customer and providing a more personalized experience to the customers. 

The conversational AI provides primary insights to the customers regarding the services provided by the companies, thus enhancing the services offered to them. 

With the use of conversational IVR, 66% of requests can be resolved faster as compared to that of human agents. 

Enhancing the Traditional IVR

The conversational AI expands the quality of IVR, by entitling it with cutting edge technology of Machine learning and Natural Language Usage (NLU), thus offering advanced voice recognition technology. This advanced voice Recognition would respond suitably, accurately, and efficiently, by comprehending the natural free flow human conversations. 

The conversational IVR also allows the AI to have intuitive conversations with human beings for having an insight regarding the customer's service demand. For the businesses, this generates a surge in the elevated customer experience and expands the customer base. With its ability to augment human interaction, conversational IVR can be used for attending multiple language queries, thus reducing the time for response. 

Enhancing Customer Services

The traditional IVR uses repetitive technology with basic performances and minimal understanding behind the intent of a customer's demand. Conversational IVR improves the understanding of the customer's intent while maintaining the existing context. It resolves the issues or queries of the customers, by giving them detailed information and advice regarding the brand products and services. 

The Conversational IVR can also gauge the complex customer query by transferring the simplified conversation to a human agent. 

Enhancing Self Learning Capabilities

One of the advantages of using conversational IVR over Traditional IVR is that it doesn't need regular human intervention to learn and improve its capabilities. The Conversational IVR relies on self-improving after every human interaction. 

For businesses this can prove lucrative for providing better customer satisfaction without altering the experience, as the conversational AI can learn from the live human interaction, thus enhancing and increasing its task handling capabilities. 

Enhancing Cost- Effectiveness

The reports suggest that conversational AI can reduce the cost per call by 1/8 times as compared to traditional IVR, by decreasing the costs associated with infrastructure and maintenance, recruitment training, and salaries for customer services. 

This will help businesses to invest in areas that require immediate attention and capital.