Contact Solutions Blog

More and more BPOs see the value in outsourcing their IVR applications

There are tough problems facing BPOs today that can be solved. Off-shoring is not working out. Contact centers are back in North America but costs are going up while quality is declining. This is usually counterproductive to the BPO’s customer’s mission. So now automation is thrust to the forefront to help make their programs profitable. We try to improve automation but still integrate to the live agent easily as the caller’s demand warrants. The incremental improvement comes from more effective self-service.

An example is an electronic benefits support application we developed for a client. Originally, the BPO thought that the internally managed application was being optimized. After we took over the application, we noticed on the first day of operation that call volume dropped by 20 percent. Calls were not getting handled in the legacy IVR properly because the host integration to the databases was inefficient. Callers trained themselves to easily opt out to a live agent for simple things such as account balance. Callers wanted to be self-served. Our state of the art integration protocols and monitoring tools allowed callers to get what they needed the first time they tried and automation rates significantly improved.