For example, when someone first calls in and you want to verify them, you can use their name and directly ask if it’s them.Īn ASR’s job is to take speech, recognize it as something meaningful, and then turn it into something useful like text. Using TTS instead of recordings is critical, as it enables you to personalize questions. This turns text into speech, which allows you to ask questions quickly.
These aren’t the only pieces to the puzzle, but they are important ones. How does Conversational IVR work, exactly?Ĭonversational IVR s work by leveraging three key technologies: Text-to-Speech (TTS), Automatic Speech Recognizers ( ASR s), and Natural Language Understanding (NLU). Importantly, always give them a way to correct themselves. If they are not calling for that reason, ask them why they have called and allow them to use natural language to answer. If they answer ‘yes’, provide them with appropriate information. Now that you’ve made an assumption, confirm that’s the reason they are calling with a simple yes/no prompt. Likewise, if you are an airline and they have a flight booked on your airline that departs within the next 24 hours, they are likely to be calling in connection with that flight. Once you’ve identified the caller, use data available from your back-end systems to anticipate the reason for calling and personalize the next steps.įor example, if you are a power company and a customer’s home is in the middle of a known power outage, you can assume that is the reason for their call. You can look up the phone number they are calling from in your back-end systems and see if you can determine their identity from that and you can add in speech recognition and voice biometric authentication to fast-track the process. You can use a blend of technologies to simplify and speed up this process. The very first thing a good speech IVR system should do is quickly identify and confirm who the caller is. By following this model, you can produce frictionless, intuitive, and personalized interactions with callers to radically improve their experience. If you listen to the very best contact center agents within a business, and model how they question callers and solve issues, you’ll understand how callers really ask questions and you’ll be in a better position to create a natural language IVR environment that provides very lifelike IVR responses. Most of these issues are easily resolved with an artful blend of good design and modern speech recognition technologies-an approach that LumenVox calls “Speech Art”. How can contact centers address these pain points? This happens when customers are forced to listen all the way to the very end of the prompt before they can ask to go back to the main menu.
ISPEECH IVR SERIES
The flow is stilted and feels nothing like a natural conversation-just a series of “painful, tiny steps” that make the whole process uncomfortable for the caller.Īnother problem is “IVR jail”, from which there is no escape route. First, they are asked for one piece of information, then another piece, and another. It’s not a conversation, it’s an interrogation. One of the biggest issues with current Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems is that callers are forced to follow a rigid script. What are the biggest issues facing customers and IVRs today?
ISPEECH IVR SOFTWARE
We asked Shaun McThomas, a Software Engineer at LumenVox, to share his perspectives on the art of integrating speech technology with IVRs to enhance the customer experience. Speech technology can truly bring the customer experience to life, but this requires a unique blend of creativity, technology, and hardware.