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New Business OpportunityMobile Customer Self-services

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New Business Opportunity – Mobile Customer Self-services

Visual IVR

IntroductionThere have always been two main objectives for technology to support customer care services:

1. Improve customer satisfaction by being responsive to customer needs for information, transactions, and live assistance

2. Reduce customer support costs

With the wired telephone as the basis for most legacy interactions with consumers, customer support was limited to either talking with a live agent (expensive) or limited to voice-based IVR self-service applications, using the old telephone user interface (TUI). The latter approach could only handle simple and short interactions, and usually ended up with the frustrated caller hanging up or pressing “0” to reach a live agent.

Today, with over 70% of consumers carrying multimodal, mobile smartphones or tablets, not only can customers interact directly with online self-service applications and flexibly access live assistance (via text chat, email, social messaging), but they are now more accessible for personalized, proactive, automated “notifications,” with more rapid and flexible response options.

Since recent surveys have shown that customers prefer to do things themselves, multimodal mobility is now making it possible for business organizations to accomplish both objectives listed above through the increased use of mobile self-service applications. However, there is now the challenge of developing many new customized, customer self-service “mobile apps,” while also migrating gracefully from legacy voice-based IVR applications to the greater capabilities of screen-based self-services for smart phones and tablets, called “Visual IVR.”


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Differentiating Self-services From Live AssistanceCustomer self-services focus on enabling customers, who know what they want, in terms of accessing standard user information or performing basic and simple transactions, to do so, any time, anywhere, with any standard endpoint device. This is different than when customers have a question or problem that is not covered by available online information, or when they have a complaint to lodge to be acknowledged and fixed. (For such cases, they will need to have access to live assistance via the various forms of contact that are now available, including email, SMS, chat, voice messaging, social (text) messaging, voice conversations, and, more recently, video messaging and video calls.)

The key point here is that customers really prefer to do things directly by themselves, when it is easier and faster than doing it by waiting for live assistance.

Organizations, that want to minimize customer support costs, will therefore want to maximize the number of self-service applications they can make available to customers, as well as provide flexible options for contextual live assistance, if needed, from within such applications.

Why Voice (IVR) Is Not Enough For Self-serviceBefore the Internet and multimodal, mobile smartphones, consumers relied mainly on wired telephones (or cell phones) for calling a business number, which may have offered Interactive Voice Response (IVR) self-service applications. However, IVR was extremely limited in what it offered callers in the way of information and transactions through voice output, so it was not uncommon that such telephone calls ended up quickly in a voice connection with an agent.

Voice response and the Touch-Tone (TUI) user interface have always been time inefficient and not cost effective for anything more than very simple (and short) information retrievals and transactions. It was also expensive to record voice information for output, although “speech to text” technologies helped a bit. This problem was particularly true if the information being retrieved was large or needed to be transcribed by the caller. In addition, because mobile users may be in environments that are not suitable for listening or speaking, voice is often not practical. So, although there has been widespread use and investment in legacy IVR applications for legacy telephone users, it is now time to support new mobile smartphone, and tablet users with a more efficient visual user interface for self-service applications.

Customers really prefer to do things directly by themselves, when it is easier and faster than doing it by waiting for live assistance.


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IVR Shortcomings

• Listening to voice menus is slow and error-prone

• Information input is very limited (alphanumerics)

• Information output is very limited (short responses only)

• Call flow logic is difficult to navigate, especially when moving back between levels

• Voice output often requires manual transcription of information which is both time-consuming and error-prone

• Pressing “0” for live assistance was pre-programmed to transfer the call to a single group of agents, rather than selectively based on the context of the IVR action being used.

• Legacy IVR applications do not preserve contextual information when the caller presses “0” to transfer the call to live assistance

• While IVR applications can now utilize speech recognition technology (both natural language and “directed” speech recognition), speech input is usually too expensive and inconsistent.


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Why Use Visual IVR Rather Than Legacy IVR Applications For Multimodal Mobile Customers?As described above, IVR has serious shortcomings for any kind of telephone callers that can now be alleviated with multimodal smartphones or tablets. Since, there has been rapid adoption of those devices, Visual IVR applications can be quickly exploited for more flexibility and user efficiency in both information entry and output. This, in turn, will expand the role of automated self-service applications and reduce the need for live assistance.

Self-service applications can now be more easily customized to satisfy a variety of different mobile customer needs, including the use of different user interfaces and different application options for different use cases. In addition, “click-for-assistance” options can be different for individual mobile user needs, including the customer’s choice of connection (chat, voice, video). Visual IVR will work particularly well for the many mobile user situations where voice input and output would be disruptive or difficult, e.g., noisy environments, in meetings, etc.

Since mobile customers are more accessible, they will benefit greatly from timely and proactive “notifications” from automated business processes (CEBP). This will include being able to “click-to-respond” options that can be messages, links to a web portal, or to live assistance, which would be difficult or impossible with traditional telephony connections or “Outbound IVR.”

Visual IVR applications will work particularly well in “cloud” environments, which can service mobile users wherever they are. In addition, such “cloud” applications can be more easily developed, integrated, trialed, and managed in a “cloud” environment, rather than on premise-based systems. This will include the flexibility for supporting a variety of different mobile devices and mobile operating systems.

When it is necessary for a customer to wait in queue to talk to live assistance, they will be able to see information about the choice of live assistance available and wait times, provide feedback on their experience, options for other self-services, view special, personalized promotions, etc. In effect, this doesn’t waste the customer’s time doing nothing while waiting on hold and listening to music and general announcements, but gives them more flexible control over what they can do with their time.

Visual IVR applications will work particularly well in “cloud” environments, which can service mobile users wherever they are.


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Planning and Implementation Challenges – Not Simple!Business organizations that want to maximize the use of mobile customer self-service applications, will need even more professional services help in planning, designing, and integrating customized mobile apps than they needed for legacy IVR applications for call centers. This will include the following kinds of expert assistance from channel partners and consultants:

• Identifying high-value customer “use cases” and determining cost/benefits for such self-services for specific vertical market needs

• Plan a migration from existing self-services (online, IVR) to multimodal mobile self-services

• Help select technology vendors and service providers to support planned application implementations

• Designing customized online Web applications for mobile consumer devices

• Designing and integrating proactive notifications from business process applications

• Providing flexible “click-for-live assistance” options from “mobile apps” that integrate with real-time connections to contact center access and routing (messaging, IM chat, voice, video)

• Implementing flexible multimodal desktop interfaces for customer-facing staff to support mobile customers

• Providing for security and privacy of information exchanged with mobile customers

• Providing interoperability for “mobile apps” to support various mobile devices and mobile Operating Systems

• Implementing ‘mobile apps” in different “cloud” environments

• Trialing mobile customer apps

• Capturing and centralizing all customer activity for both “contextual” interaction management and analytics reporting (including monitoring social messaging)

• Defining and implementing network requirements for handling multimodal interactions traffic

• Designing and implementing operational reports to manage all aspects of customer service activities

• Provide ongoing change management services to support ongoing operational needs


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Migrating From Existing IVR ApplicationsAlthough smartphones and tablets can now enable the use of more flexible and efficient multimodal self-service applications, there are still significant challenges for implementation, including:

• New online “mobile apps” will take time to design and develop and integrate for multimodal use

• Many customers will continue using the voice-only telephone as before and will still need current IVR applications

For these reasons, it will always be necessary to maintain existing IVR applications, while also implementing new, Visual IVR applications. So, the practical starting point for implementing Visual IVR applications is to use existing IVR apps as the basis for designing the new Visual IVR versions. This approach will:

• Retain telephony interactions for legacy callers

• Create new visual user interfaces for existing IVR application logic

• Enable original IVR apps to be more easily and quickly transformed to Visual IVR to include more efficient and flexible user functionality that visual interfaces can provide

So, Where Do You Start?Developing Visual IVR applications from existing IVR applications will provide a practical implementation starting point and implementation strategy for migrating to new Visual IVR applications. It will preserve existing (IVR) applications for telephone callers, while allowing new capabilities to be developed for such existing use cases. It will then facilitate the development of new use case applications that could never be done with just a voice telephony interface.

Visual IVR applications can start with existing IVR application logic, as mentioned above. Development tools, from vendors like Jacada, can provide “Drag and Drop” design and minimize the need for internal IT resources. New Visual IVR applications can be rapidly deployed and trialed in “clouds” before being quickly released for use by mobile customers. In addition, any new functional changes that come up can be quickly and selectively implemented when needed.

Finally, IP connectivity for Visual IVR will result in lower operational costs than when using the PSTN and legacy wireless network services.


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Expanding Role For Channel Partners With Visual IVRIn a recent conference poll, a channel partner audience was questioned about their interest in helping their clients to develop mobile self-service applications for customers. The basic poll results were as follows:

1. Only 15% of the audience was currently involved with developing online or IVR self-service applications.

2. Over 80% of the audience indicated that they were planning to offer such services to their clients in the future, as self-service application technology becomes more multi-channel and visual.

These findings confirmed the fact that user organizations would need external expertise and help in developing “mobile apps” for customers that would also be multi-channel and more complex for live customer assistance. It also reflects the need for better tools and services that can simplify the initial migration step from existing telephony IVR applications to Visual IVR.

An opportunity also exists for increased consulting assignments to help client organizations optimize their business processes for customer self-services through greater efficiencies in the mobile Customer Experience, coupled with greater flexibility in accessing multimodal live assistance. This would not only differentiate their customer support capabilities from the competition, but also, most importantly, provide a graceful, first migration step from existing IVR applications in the customer journey to multi-modal customer services.

What consultants and solution integrators now need are the new tools for easily implementing Visual IVR applications, and one of the leading providers in this new technology is Jacada. Jacada’s cloud-based Visual IVR service offering will work particularly well with new capabilities for flexible “click-for-assistance” that will be enabled by WebRTC connectivity over the Internet from browser-based online applications. It will also be a perfect fit for accessing the PureCloud interaction center services recently announced by leading contact center provider, Interactive Intelligence.

Better tools and services can simplify the initial migration step from existing telephony IVR applications to Visual IVR.


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Summary Software applications are moving into “clouds” for easier and faster implementations and management. This also works well for the rapid consumer adoption of mobile smartphones, enabling direct access to online information and simple transactions, without having to first wait in queue to talk to a call center agent. This trend is shifting the focus of customer service to self-service “mobile apps” as a starting point that will require a visual user interface, rather than the limitations of the old Telephone User Interface used by legacy IVR systems.

Because there will be a need to also support existing telephone callers with current IVR applications, the practical approach is to develop new Visual IVR applications that will be consistent with the old IVR apps. This will be particularly important for providing common access to live assistance from either mode of self-service.

Old IVR applications were rarely developed by internal IT staffs, and, with the increased complexity of Visual IVR applications, external expertise will be required to design and develop applications for the many new “mobile app” use cases that organizations will provide for their different mobile customer needs. So, helping clients migrate old and inefficient IVR applications to Visual IVR will be a practical first step towards new opportunities for developing many new mobile self-service applications in the future. Jacada’s Visual IVR software offerings uniquely support that strategy for consultants and channel partners.

The practical approach is to develop new Visual IVR applications that will be consistent with the old IVR apps.


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What To Look For In Visual IVR Software Tools Visual IVR capabilities for mobile customers are just starting to become available, so it is important to be aware of what will facilitate rapid migration from existing IVR apps, as well as creating new mobile customer self-service from scratch.

A 2014 global study of Customer Service Experience by Interactive Intelligence indicated that while customer care professionals do not (yet) prefer to use customer self-service applications from smartphones and tablets, the main reason is that their technology infrastructure is not yet set up for it. So, the opportunities are waiting for good software implementation tools.

The following key capabilities will be particularly valuable to support either a migration from legacy IVR apps or new mobile self-service apps:

• Doesn’t require a native mobile app to initiate a direct phone call to either have a conversational voice connection or a Visual IVR interaction. This will facilitate increased accessibility and adoption by consumers/customers.

• Capability to match a Visual IVR session with an agent interaction option, which will ensure that the appropriate agent will see the current context of your self-service activity.

• Ability to plug into your existing IVR infrastructure through reusing the Voice IVR scripts. They dynamically interpret the VXML output of the Voice IVR and render a visual navigation on top of that. This is great for rapid implementation and reuse of your existing assets, in addition to offering consistency to telephony and mobile users.

• A good graphical designer to easily create new enhanced flows over and above your existing Voice flows. This lets you exploit visual input and output, such as entering alphanumeric data or taking photos to improve self-service. The designer should be built from the ground-up to be “business” friendly, not requiring IT to maintain customer service flows.

• Ability to generate graphical reports that show you exactly where callers /customers are struggling, where they are changing to a voice connection session, where they are dropping off, etc. Changes can then be made in real-time and to improve user interactions efficiency.

• To satisfy individual organizational needs, the Visual IVR technology should be available either as an on-premise install or hosted on a service provider cloud. The cloud deployment means you can be up and running quickly with minimal IT investment.

About the Author

Art Rosenberg has been a thought-leading pioneer in interactive computing and contact center technologies, starting with the Rand Corporation and later with Delphi Communications in those two areas of computer technology. To read more about his current interests in UC and Mobile Customer Services go to his bio at the UC Strategies website.


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