Contact Solutions Blog

Get Out of the Dark Ages: Bring a Surgeon to your IVR Tuning Process

So often the Contact Center automation industry and its leading aficionados will have you believe that tuning your speech grammars and underlying recognition engine is the road to IVR improvement. We feel that the process of IVR tuning encompasses much more than just sophisticated speech tuning.

Gone are the days that IVR is simply a voice user interface that routes calls. Today, the end-to-end user experience is defined by ever more sophisticated host-system integrations, call center integrations and third-party transactional services.  A caller’s path to a successful and satisfying IVR experience is a combination of menu navigation and transactional processing.  The finest speech- or touch-tone structures cannot counteract a sloppy end-to-end integration with a back-end host database.  Tuning your IVR around menu structures and caller navigation is a good thing to do, but is valueless if the end-to-end self-service transactions do not work or take too long.

Sticking strictly to the user-interface tuning, in particular the grammar performance of a Large Vocabulary Directed Dialogue, speech IVR is synonymous with medieval surgery:  blunt force surgery, with little regard for the overall health of the patient.

Through careful gathering of multiple types of IVR performance data, Contact Solutions brings the techniques of modern surgery to the process tuning your IVR. Instead of the traditional approach of implementing and then moving on to the next project, we monitor our implementations carefully and consistently, collecting and analyzing data that includes user-interface metrics, host metrics, transfer statistics, exit point data, pathing, check pointing, and network latency. And, we look at this data over extended periods of time.  Speech tuning tends to be point-in-time and has no regard for how the application might change during peak periods of the day, month or even how it might change as data accumulates in the host database. We look at all of this and more.

It’s time to put your IVR in the hands of industry surgeons.

Tags: Contact Automation, Continuous Improvement, Continuous Improvement Practice, customer satisfaction, IVR, IVR design, ivr solutions, IVR Technology, technology innovation