Can IVR Ever Substitute A Live Agent?

The possibilities of automation offered by speech recognition technologies and IVR seem to have answered the prayers of many business owners. These programs provide business owners with the ability to run phone systems that are functional and handy at the same time and which can be managed by minimalistic staff. The possibility of smaller staff directly translates the entire scenario with the promise of greater savings. However, there is more to running an efficacious business rather than keeping an eye on the cost-effectiveness of it. While both of these systems offer satisfactory and acceptable solution to limited range of business complications they should not be measured as a magical cure for the phone system.

Drawbacks of the system

IVR and speech recognition was introduced a long time ago during the 1970’s and adopted by call centers during the same period. Today, these technologies are able to ascertain and identify spoken words and phrases with a higher degree of precision which holds a lot of promise as the algorithms of the system becomes more sophisticated. Its ability to merge with business applications provide a whole new domain of opportunities for business of all sizes. However, with all their progress and advancements these technologies are not yet proficient to handle and replicate the astuteness or intelligence level and conversational adaptability of a human being. If your system requires more than selecting a multiple choice options from a list or simply entering yes/no feedbacks then the typical IVR technology will be incapable to meet the needs of your caller.

Providing an edge

You will hardly find any call center in the present day that doesn’t use IVR development services. It offers varied solutions which are effective and efficient in identifying the general needs of the caller such as accurately directing their caller to the correct line. As long as verification, direction-finding and queuing can be achieved through entering characters in a keypad or speaking a few words, the use of IVR is mandatory. In fact, for simple tasks like, IVR can arguably perform better services than human especially in the face of large capacity of incoming calls.

Situation where IVR fails

There are a few chief aspects where IVR fails to live up to the expectations and they are:

1. The system recognizes only those responses that are programmed
2. Most visitors/callers find this technology frustrating to navigate

Similarly the functionality of the IVR system is limited to each caller’s aptitude to navigate through the branches. Most of the functions of the system are treated as a guessing game because on one side the business owners are attempting to provide automatic solutions for the needs of their callers that haven’t vocalized yet and on the other side the callers are figuring out the arbitrary order/sequence of responses which will lead them to find the answer. That is why most of the callers find IVR systems frustrating to navigate especially when compared to resolving the issue through a live agent. However, mainstream IVR system has not yet progressed to the level that it can inculcate flexibility and problem solving capacity of a live operator.

Fundamentals

IVR solutions signify as a mandatory evil for big organization and business that receive large volume of calls on a regular basis and they play an integral part in the new PBX systems. That does not mean small and medium sized firms increase usage of the system. They should try and use it to the absolute minimum. Wholly combined IVR solutions may cutback the operational costs but they should not affect the quality of the company’s customer service. It is apparent if the customers’ needs are not met effectively then it will cause a problem for the organization.