Adaptive IVR: It’s All About Behavior

When you hear terms such as “adaptive personalization,” Interactive Voice Response (IVR) probably isn’t the first thing that springs to mind.

In fact, most people don’t associate those words with the contact center at all, but they are becoming increasingly important in the customer service profession and in other service-oriented industries.

Although I didn’t realize it at the time, my bank was the first to introduce me to adaptive personalization based upon my behavior at their automatic teller machine (ATM). When I use an ATM, more often than not it’s to withdraw the same amount of cash each time and have a printed receipt delivered with it.

A couple of years ago I walked up to an ATM, inserted my debit card and up popped a window that said “Your most frequent transaction is to withdraw $XXX and get a printed receipt. Is that what you’d like to do today?” I was a bit surprised but touched the “Yes” button, entered my PIN and walked away with my cash and receipt just like that. It was quick, convenient and to tell the truth, I felt a bit special. Someone at the bank noticed me!

What noticed me was not the bank per se, but rather the predictive analytics employed by the bank to better understand their customers’ behaviors and then based upon that understanding, improve customer service. With any luck, this same level of predictive analytics is about to come to an IVR system near you.

IVR has traditionally been a contact center self-help solution that people love to hate. While it does facilitate customer service without having to wait on hold to speak to an agent, its “one size fits all” approach to customer service has proven for many to be as frustrating as waiting on hold.

Listening to irrelevant menu options and having to perform multiple, repetitive data entry for verification purposes before getting to the heart of the problem that prompted the call in the first place is often the root cause of this love/hate relationship.

Predictive analytics and adaptive personalization are changing the way IVR presents to the customer today and, in my opinion, will soon change customer expectations of IVR in the future. Rather than taking every customer down the same path to resolution as traditional IVR systems do, Adaptive IVR personalizes the customer experience based upon each customer’s behavior as they interact with the IVR. Self-service calls are a customized journey taking the caller to different interaction points based upon the analysis of that individual caller’s historical behavior and preferences.

Using another banking example, let’s assume that I’m a frequent caller to my bank’s IVR system, usually to get my checking account balance. Traditional IVR would take me through a predetermined set of menu options, possibly involving a number of steps, in order to get me to the information I desire. Adaptive IVR, on the other hand, would give me the option of getting my checking account balance as soon as I log in rather than directing me to a menu of options. This is the type of convenience and service that characterizes the concept of customer engagement optimization.

Similar to Artificial Intelligence (AI), Adaptive IVR continues to learn and improve its adaptive capabilities with every customer interaction. This is accomplished using proprietary, patented algorithms, which means that Adaptive IVR is available from one supplier only. It is not, however, limited in its desirability. Adaptive IVR is destined to become an integral component of any customer engagement optimization strategy in the very near future.

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