Hosted IVR

May 15, 2012

USAN IVR: Serve the Customer, Not the Channel

By Rachel Ramsey
TMCnet Web Editor

First-Call Resolution (FCR) is one of the best things you can do for your customers and your company when providing customer support. USAN (News - Alert), a provider of contact center cloud solutions and multi-channel customer engagement products, works with IVR to achieve FCR.

USAN provides a comprehensive portfolio of call center products, including flexible network-based Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, Outbound Dialers and Automatic Call Distributors (ACDs). It offers automated call care and live agent call care for financial services, outsourcers, contact centers, payment providers and healthcare organizations.

Multiple channels can create unforeseen frustrations. Satisfaction can decrease if customers receive inconsistent information or can’t do what they want on an elected channel. Resolving customers’ issues at first touch, in a consistent manner across multiple channels, can be an exhausting dilemma if the services and resolutions offered to customers are not the same on every channel.

IVR is specifically designed to achieve first-call resolution. The IVR channel is easy to analyze, configure and align with a customer’s transaction goals.

USAN’s IVR offers a broad range of speech applications including text-to-speech, simple and complex speech recognition and legacy touchtone services to make it possible for callers to press phone keys or speak requests that are facilitated by automated service systems. The USAN IVR also offers automate inbound customer service, hosted, on-premise or hybrid deployment, and support for multiple integration points and legacy systems.

It features flexible, customizable call flow design, CTI (News - Alert) interface, advanced speech recognition, carrier-grade SS7 and peer-to-peer protocol connectivity, automatic number identification fraud management, and it supports multi-carrier transport.

Higher-touch service transactions that were previously only possible with live-agent assistance, such as requesting a payment extension or a balance increase, can now be achieved within an IVR system that is integrated with other business systems of record. The same business process rules that aid agents in serving customers can be applied in the IVR channel as well.

With examination of IVR activity, businesses can learn what transaction-types are selected most, when customers abort an IVR call, and when callers choose to speak with a live agent. A well-scripted and finely tuned IVR can do wonders for first-call resolution. When it is integrated with other communication channels, businesses systems and customer data, the propensity for FCR is even higher.

As more and more customers adopt smartphones and other burgeoning channels that enable immediate service and a full-range of capabilities, companies will begin to adopt the mantra of serving the customer and not the channel.

Rooms To Go, an independent furniture company, recently selected USAN’s social media monitoring and customer contact software for its 275-seat contact center. Officials with USAN said that Rooms To Go will utilize the blended inbound/outbound capabilities of the company’s on-premise automatic call distributor, interactive voice response, and predictive dialer platform to facilitate customer service and deliveries, appointment setting, confirmations and reminders.

Edited by Juliana Kenny