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Hosted Contact Centres
hosted speech IVR spending will outpace onpremises
IVR by more than 200 per cent, according
to a recent Ovum study. By 2016, the analyst firm
predicts that hosted speech IVR revenues will exceed
on-premises by nearly 250 per cent.
Some of the benefits that come with hosted IVR are
relatively obvious. For example, as with any cloudbased
IT or contact center solution, a hosted IVR
service virtually eliminates CapEx. And because the
vendor amortizes the operations over hundreds of
customers, with each one paying only for the service
it uses, each customer’s OpEx is also reduced. Those
savings are compelling, especially now during the
global recession, when every organization is looking
to lower costs.
Other economic benefits are far less obvious,
especially as IVR technologies are becoming more
intelligent and conversational. Hosted IVR providers
enable immediate access to these newest and
most sophisticated IVR technologies, freeing their
customers from the cost and time investment that
comes with purchasing, integrating and deploying
new technologies on premises. That creates a window
of opportunity for hosted customers to use a new
technology to deliver a customer service experience
so compelling that it becomes a powerful market
differentiator. In other cases, a hosted solution
provides access to cutting-edge technologies that the
organization otherwise couldn’t cost justify if it had
to buy the necessary hardware and software, as well
as hire specialized staff to support it.
One of those technologies is voice biometric
authentication. Instead of requiring callers to
remember information such as PINs – which 10 per
cent of customers need to reset each month – or
account numbers, the IVR system simply compares
the caller’s voice to a voiceprint created when she
became a customer. Many organizations also use
biometric authentication to compare callers to a
database of known fraudsters. With a hosted IVR,
companies can implement biometric authentication
faster and more cost-effectively, resulting in higher
self-service rates.
Why mobile is key
Many of today’s hosted IVR solutions enable
organizations to extend IVR technologies to other
customer touchpoints. Because 60 per cent or
more of customer service calls come from mobile
phones, particularly smartphones, organizations are
looking to simplify self-service for mobile users and
remove the inconvenience associated with typing
information on a small screen. With hosted IVR, the
time and resources invested to build IVR applications
using speech recognition, natural language, voice
synthesis (text to speech) and biometrics can costeffectively
be extended to enable a more natural
spoken interface for mobile apps.
This “IVR mobilization” strategy gets a boost
from another trend. Thanks to platforms such as
Samsung’s S Voice, Google Now and Siri on the iPhone
4S, consumers and businesspeople are increasingly
comfortable with the concept of speaking to apps as a
way to get answers. That’s possible because with the
right IVR technology, those apps are now capable of
accurately understanding and providing answers.
The ideal IVR solution today provides the same
level of intelligence – often called “natural language
understanding” – to understand not only what callers
are saying, but also their intent. IVRs of the past
required callers to stick to a limited set of spoken
phrases in response to IVR questions.
For example, a caller might be required to say
“departure information” or “arrival times” in
response to an airline’s IVR system. But if the caller
instead uses everyday terms such as “When is it
leaving?” or “What time does it land?” – a style
similar to what they’d use with Siri – many IVR
systems become confused because they don’t have
the statistical models to find a match.
Hosted IVRs, with the latest technology plus data
models built from billions of calls, have an advanced
ability to deliver on the conversational aspects that
callers are becoming accustomed to. And as more and
more companies move to hosted IVR, those models
become more robust, continuously improving caller
interactions and company economics via more callers
successfully self-serving.
US Airways illustrates the advantage of
conversational IVR. In July 2011, the airline used a
hosted IVR service to launch an IVR application that
includes:
The ability for callers to naturally speak the reason
for their call.
Features that personally greet callers and provide
relevant information without the need to talk or type.
Advanced audio read back that sounds extremely
natural instead of robotic.
The US Airways IVR truly provides the effortless
self-service that consumers and business traveler’s
value.
“The more we know about our customers and the
16 | contactmanagement.ca FALL 2012