The two IVR titans are without a doubt Genesys and Cisco. It’s impressive that Cisco has become a major contact center vendor in recent years as the company was founded and grew as a data equipment manufacturer. Competitors like Genesys, Avaya, Intervoice, and Nortel have been in the business for years: Genesys has always focused on CTI; Intervoice’s forte was IVRs; and Avaya and Nortel were traditional PBX firms which saw contact center as a natural additional to their portfolios. Cisco’s duel with Genesys only underscores the trend of IP-centric communications and unified communications.

This begs the question: When communication is unified and standardized across all (most?) platform and vendors, then what differentiates their offerings?

How about user and development tools? I think tools will become the differentiating factor in deciding who maintains sustainability and growth. Good tools will be the value added element alongside an IVR sale. For example, Genesys in its latest version 8 release is clearly re-tooling to make administration and development easier and more efficient. Then there are platform and vendor independent companies like OpenMethods which makes development tools like OpenVXML for the masses, whether you’re a novice or experienced VXML developer.

We are at the dawn of the contact center tools era.

Eugene

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Self-service systems are now so ingrained into the corporate customer service portfolio that IVR implementations are no longer an “if” question but “when” and “how much?” In today’s down economy, the strategy is to get more bang for the buck. That usually means rethinking the IVR architecture and solution to use a hosting vendor instead of paying for the hardware to house IVRs on-premise.

And it’s not just the IVRs, either. Hosted CRM solutions following the SaaS (software-as-a-service) model such as RightNow are gaining momentum as well. This is even evident in what major software companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Google are advocating, except they usually refer it as “cloud computing.”

Besides dollar-value benefits, hosted/managed/SaaS solutions allow for greater flexibility and scalability. For example, a company can regularly adjust the number of IVR ports according to call volume projections. Or purchase additional software licenses as needed.

We’re glad to see a focus on IVRs and self-service systems in recent mainstream news outlets. After all, no matter how the economy is doing, every company has a goal of offering the best customer service possible.

Eugene

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Seeing a demo of this would be nice. But it got me thinking…

With the capabilities of today’s mobile network and cell phones, would it be nice to have a simple UI mini-application tied to the dialing of an IVR? Here’s an example:

An application called “Acme Bank IVR” can be clicked (or “touched,” for those fancy touch-screen smartphones) to invoke a call to said bank. Once the call is connected, the caller sees on his (or her) phone screen the menu options as they are presented. In other words, the IVR is synchronized with the cell phone screen.

Better yet, there can be many of these applets, and anytime a call is initiated to a number associated with an applet, the applet runs and presents the on-screen menus. The caller can simply use the speaker phone feature and navigate the IVR by also looking at the screen.

Good idea or bad idea?

Eugene

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Major voice portal providers include Avaya, Cisco, Convergys’ Intervoice unit, and Nortel. Travelocity built its voice portal application, which runs on a Tomcat application server, with Intervoice InVision Studio tools and uses a Nuance Speechworks media server for speech recognition.

IT can also roll its own voice portals using a combination of industry standards and specialized development tools offered by vendors such as OpenMethods, Syntellect, and Voxeo. Many savvy IT departments simply write their own in Java.

However, it’s somewhat disappointing that upon further reading, OpenMethods’ OpenVXML isn’t mentioned as one of the premier open source Eclipse IDE for voice applications development. Many vendors may offer IDEs based on Eclipse, but the differentiation lies in that OpenVXML is open source.

Eugene

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M.T.A.: First voice: “For information regarding the new fare effective June 28, 2009, press 1.” [Long pause.] Second voice: “For information regarding Broadway bus reroutes in Midtown Manhattan, press 5 now.” Third voice: “For current bus and subway status information, press 1. For citywide test location and direction, press 2. Or press 9 to continue.”

What are “citywide test locations,” why did the M.T.A. use 1 twice, and where is the Trip Planner Voice is? Since Trip Planner Voice wasn’t one of the first four, I pressed 9.

M.T.A.: A long comment about wheelchair accessibility, followed by, “If you need to know how to get from one location to another, say plan a route.”

Now we’re cooking!

City Room: “Plan a route.”

M.T.A.: “All right. In order to plan a route, I need to know what type of starting point, your destination and when you will be traveling.”

M.T.A: “Which borough are you starting in?”

City Room: “Manhattan.”

M.T.A.: “Sorry I didn’t get that. Are you starting in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island?”

City Room: “Manhattan.”

M.T.A.: “I need to know [truncated] which type of starting point you will be. So, would you like to tell me an intersection, landmark, or point of interest, subway stop, or address?”

City Room: “Address.”

M.T.A.: “Go ahead and say the street address you’ll be starting at, like 55 Broad Street. You can also say ‘Back up.’”

A decision was made to start from The New York Times’s building.

City Room: “620 Eighth Avenue.”

M.T.A.: “620 Double-U End Avenue. Is this right?”

Double-U End Avenue? It must be “West End Avenue.”

City Room: “620 Eighth Avenue.”

M.T.A.: “You wanted 620 Double-U End Avenue. Right?”

City Room: “No.”

M.T.A.: “Go ahead and say the street address you’ll be starting at, like 55 Broad Street. You can also say ‘Back up.’”

City Room: “620 Eighth Avenue.”

M.T.A.: “620 Double-U End Avenue. Is this right?”

City Room: “No.”

M.T.A.: “I seem to be having some trouble with that address. So let’s try this another way. Please say just the street name of where you are starting: Fifth Avenue or 41st Street.”

City Room: “Eighth Avenue.”

M.T.A.: “Now tell me just the house or building number.”

City Room: “620.”

M.T.A: “Which borough are you traveling to?”

Whew! We made it!

City Room: “Queens.”

M.T.A.: “Is your destination an intersection, landmark, or point of interest, subway stop, or address?”

City Room: “Landmark.”

M.T.A.: “Go ahead or say the landmark or point of interest now, like SoHo or the Empire State Building, or say back up.”

City Room: “Flushing Town Hall.”

M.T.A.: “You wanted Flushing Hospital, right?”

City Room: “No. Flushing Town Hall.”

M.T.A.: “You wanted Flushing Hospital, right?”

City Room: “No.”

City Room decided to give up on the town hall and just aim for a general neighborhood.

City Room: “Flushing.”

M.T.A.: “You asked for a customer service representative, right?”

City Room: “No.”

M.T.A.: “I’m sorry I have trouble understanding. I’ll transfer you now. Please press 1 now for a brief survey.”

Looks like Aspect and Nuance will have some redesign and/or tuning to do…

Eugene

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What’s the most commonly used channel for customer support? In the formal sense of a customer reaching out directly to a company, statistics show the answer is still the telephone. But, taking a broader view and reframing the definition a little, I’d guess the most-used channel in the world for customers trying to get information about how to operate, repair, or modify specific products would be Google’s search engine.

Think about your own behavior: I would bet that most of you first turn to Google when you want to find out how to turn off international data-roaming on your iPhone, how to clean your glass-ceramic stovetop without damaging the surface, or how to properly cook a turkey. While Google may return gobs of extraneous noise in response to such general searches, wading through that clamor is often much more pleasant than calling 800 numbers for Apple, Bosch, or Butterball—or even using those companies’ self-service options.

And he’s absolutely right. Oftentimes before we call a number, we try to look for answers online via search engines or instant message our friends. Many folks prefer to avoid talking to a machine (IVR).

Many contact centers now deploy knowledgebases as a way to centralize and normalize an agent’s interaction with the customer. How is data fed into these KBs? Are they mainly from internal sources? Is there a KB “librarian” who’s tasked to routinely update the KBs? In today’s world, this librarian ought to scour the Web for external sources of information as well. After all, how many times have we been frustrated with clueless agents then turn to the Web to find solutions from others?

Eugene

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Sorry, Sprint, but you still don’t get it.

Eugene

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