IVR design and implementation fundamendals

IVR technology has been a part of our everyday lives for several years now. We are all familiar with phrases like “To do this, please press 5” or “Please type your PIN number”. Most of us have also been lost in the endless and “labyrinth – style” menus offered by these IVRs. It doesn’t have to be like that!

There are ways to ensure that IVR delivers quality self – service. To do that, it is important to follow some guidelines when designing the IVR application itself. Investing is complementary technologies is also of paramount importance to creating an intuitive voice interface. We will explore these principles and technologies in more detail in this post.

IVR application design principles and complementary technologies

• Keep menus simple. Complex menus are greatly annoying for the user. When designing the application flow, the number of available options presented at each stage should be kept to the minimum possible (more than 4-5 different options are too much). The options themselves must also be clearly descriptive of what can be found in the sub-menus selected. This is very important since, due to the nature of voice user interfaces, navigation mistakes on IVR are more “costly” compared to visual interfaces such as web.

• Provide easy navigation for both the new and the experienced system user. New users, that do not know anything about the specific application, need more information on what the system is about and what functionality each option offers. Encompass this information on each menu, when needed, but make sure to include the barge-in(*) functionality so that experienced users can bypass listening to these prompts repeatedly. Experienced users should also be given the option to jump directly through multiple levels. This can be easily achieved using speech recognition technologies.

• Use the latest speech recognition technologies to provide natural speech recognition. It is more expensive than simple keyword recognition and far more expensive than DTMF, but it makes navigating through voice menus substantially easier and a lot more intuitive. Use speech recognition in conjunction with DTMF when possible. It is a lot easier for the user to type his 12-digit pin than having to repeat it 3-4 times until the speech recognition engine understands it correctly. Using each technological feature on the correct situation is one of the most important parts of voice interface designing.

• Allow users to exit the application and transfer to live agent on any parts of the application. Inform them about this functionality at the beginning of the menus. Speech – enabled IVR systems often cause problems for various reasons such as accent variations or noise, so this exit option is very important.

• Use professionally recorded prompts consistently through the voice application. Text to speech, while having seen large improvement during the past few years, is still not in the position to compete with human recorded prompts in terms of quality and thus it remains still the cheap / temporary solution.

• Ensure that each piece of information is only collected once from the users. Have the IVR complement the live agents gracefully. This can be done by investing in CTI technologies which use the information gathered through the IVR and present them to agents, should the call be transferred.

• If there are queues to talk to agents, inform the users about it and also communicate them the average expected waiting time in the queue. An additional feature that can be implemented if the contact center includes outbound capabilities is auto – callback. The IVR user can state that he wants to be called back as soon as an agent is available.  The customer types in (or speaks) a phone number that they wish to be called at and then hangs up. The system can then put a token representing the customer in the queue, and when the customer’s turn arrives, an outbound call is initiated and connected directly to an agent, with the CTI information already on the agent’s screen.

• Reduce the information input to an absolute minimum. This can be done by integrating the IVR and CTI with a database of user profiles (which can be either the company’s CRM or, more often, a dedicated database synchronized with CRM). Collect the database primary key via the IVR (which is usually the user’s name and/or some PIN) and then query the database to retrieve more information about the specific user.

(*)     “Barge-in” : Refers to the ability given to an IVR user to bypass a spoken prompt and immediately enter their response to the answer (either via DTMF or through speech). As soon as the user presses a button or starts speaking, the IVR interrupts the prompt utterance and goes to the next stage to read the input. Barge – in is extremely helpful in eliminating annoying repetitive messages, especially for experienced users of the system.