CallVU today announced Conversational IVR, the latest addition to its Digital Engagement Platform, which leverages artificial intelligence (AI) technology to allow callers to use natural language for service requests.
According to Yoel Knoll, vice president of marketing at CallVU, eliminating the need for navigating complicated menus is a chief benefit. “This is a very simple way to get the same experience across not only channels in customer service but across all your communication channels. There’s no need for you to listen through long menus that were predefined by somebody in the marketing department who thought that this is the right way for the process to go when you actually just say what you want and get the service you need and cut through all these long menus,” Knoll says. “In short, we’re going to make it very easy for our customers to enjoy customer service.”
Conversational IVR has four key features: (1) it is equipped with out-of-the-box processes for retail banks, credit card issuers, insurance companies, and telecom providers; (2) it can be specifically tuned for business and use cases that are most relevant to the customer, with the goal of ensuring that the voice interaction is on-point, accurate, and productive; (3) it aims to make the service experience caller-driven by ensuring that callers get to the information they’re seeking through simple voice direction as opposed to complicated routing processes; and (4) it can be deployed over cloud solutions as well as within a data center.
Since consumers are increasingly using voice interfaces in their daily lives, customer service departments need to adapt, Knoll says.“Our customers are going to be used to talking to their appliances, to anything from their TV to their iRobot Roomba, [so] why shouldn’t they have that experience when they’re calling their bank, insurance company, [or] telecom operator?” he says. “Right now I think that any company in this space that will not have some sort of AI automated solution will be out of business within three to five years. This is the way to go. There’s no way that customer service can continue to lag behind everything else that’s going on in the world, every other communication trend. It’s better to be first than to be last for an inevitable change in the industry.”
And, Knoll points out, good customer service can be a crucial differentiator for many companies. “For our customers long-term, it’s also a great way for them to get stickiness,” he says. “It’s a very competitive market for our customers—for banks, credit unions, insurance companies, telecom operators—it’s a nasty business out there, and if you can keep your customers based on good customer service, the good experience that they’re getting, it’s great for them.”