Visual IVR – What’s it worth to customer retention

There are so many different avenues that can be explored with Visual IVR applications, but let’s focus on the potential these solutions have for incremental gains in customer retention. As a consumer, what do you really like about staying with any particular company? Cost of the product or service? Ease of use of the product or service? Or how about ease of doing business with the particular company that’s providing the product or service? Yeah Right! That last one was a trick question.

I’m going to assume that most of you are like me in that we’d prefer to solve the problem ourselves without any intervention, especially from a call center. If we use the banking industry as an example of e evolving self-service, you’ll see what I mean. Banks started with IVR’s or ATM’s (I’m not sure which came first but work with me), added features to IVR’s and ATM’s, then provided web-based services and now mobile apps on smart phones. Alone the way they provided greater and greater ease of use and empowered the consumer to solve a greater percentage of issues without human intervention. My bank has retained me for 20+ years and I rarely talk to anyone so I’m very happy.

If we look at that last step, the mobile app is now capable of true integration into the customer service fabric with what we’ll call Visual IVR.  Avaya, Genesys and Cisco all have the ability to create applications on their IVR platforms that can enhance the Voice Self Service experience by bridging what you can do with the data channel on the mobile web and integrate a voice channel with it. So now, when you take your problem solving or questions as far as you can through the mobile app, and need to escalate to the call center, everything that you’ve entered and steps taken can now be passed to the agents. Thank you for that!

I just finished playing with an app called ChoiceView from Radish Systems that lets you, the customer, see a visual depiction of the IVR menu and interact visually on your device. I downloaded the app for both my iPad as well as my Android phone (on Verizon). While on my mobile phone I was able to both talk with the agents and at the same time get visual diagrams, seating charts and pictures pushed from the agent. For the iPad it worked a little differently, I dialed from my office phone and entered my office number into the app on the iPad and then was able to interact with the agent in much the same way just not on a single device. The beauty of this solution is that it can be added to existing IVR platforms or hosted for you. Contact me if you’d like more information. Thank you.