It is a popularly held belief (see gethuman.com) that businesses install IVRs merely to be able to fire their entire staff of human Agents and thus magically make more money or to allow only higher paying customers to speak to Agents. Those who hold that belief may never be convinced of the truth, which is that a lot of what Agents do is repetitive and boring and leads to job dissatisfaction and high turnover rates, not to mention the reduced Caller experience, since the Agents are already bored and dissatisfied. Installing an IVR automates the simple tasks, leaving Agents with the more complicated and therefore interesting tasks with Callers, whether that is because the Caller simply requires or requests additional assistance or because the task at hand is currently beyond efficient automation or security capabilities. Now on the issue of attempting to achieve the ability to say goodbye to Agents entirely in our future, that’s a research question, but one I’m not too interested in personally. In 10 years, we may be good enough at recognition and automation and security to eliminate the technical need for Agents, but from a usability perspective, we may always need at least some agents available. Callers naturally feel more secure about their phone transactions knowing the Agent safety net is there, whether they need it or not and the courtesy of being told it’s available is a likeable feature for them. In addition to that, no matter how good recognition and automation get, there will always ideally need to be an error-out option when things just go wrong. Maybe that’s not a live agent, but a call back or leave a message situation, but humans need to be available at some point in the process even then. So, when a customer comes to you and says they want an IVR system installed that completely eliminates the need for Agents, try not to promise the sky.

Simonie

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