Revolutionise CX in your contact centre through IVR modernisation

About the authors

• Puneet Badlani is a Worldwide Senior Partner Solution Architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Jack Godfrey is a Sales Director at Connect, a UK-based AWS Partner

Introduction

As traditional resource-intensive interactive voice response (IVR) systems reach end of life, contact centre operators have an opportunity to transform the complex and often clunky customer experience (CX) associated with legacy systems by embracing a cloud-based IVR modernisation strategy.

Over the years, IVR systems have become a critical tool to automate frontline customer engagement using voice prompts and touch-tone inputs. However, legacy IVR systems typically have limited self-service options, relying on long menus and complex navigation via voice prompts to guide callers to the appropriate department or service agent, often leading to frustration and longer wait times. These cumbersome engagements can result in frustrating experiences for customers, who increasingly demand quick, efficient interactions via their preferred channel. Shifting customer expectations around engagements also necessitates greater personalisation at every touchpoint.

Amazon Connect is a cloud-based contact center solution that offers advanced capabilities for modernizing IVR systems. The remainder of this blog post will explore how embracing cloud-based IVR modernization can revolutionize customer experience in contact centers, detailing the benefits, technologies, and strategies involved in this transformation.

A cloud solution to IVR modernisation

While IVR modernisation is the key to addressing these legacy issues, an inability to easily integrate modern digital channels into legacy IVR systems makes it difficult to find solutions to these challenges and is increasingly rendering legacy IVR systems obsolete as contact centre technology advances at a rapid pace. By embracing a cloud-based IVR system in a hosted environment like Amazon Web Services (AWS), contact centre operators gain access to a wide range of capabilities and integration opportunities to drive IVR modernisation.

The payoff for this investment includes enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty, reduced call handling times and operational costs, improved first-call resolution rates, and the ability to collect more data and analytics to support continuous improvements. These benefits stem from a organisation’s ability to embrace a host of advanced modern technologies when adopting a cloud-based IVR modernisation approach.

Access advanced capabilities and technologies

Advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) can significantly enhance the capabilities and performance of contact centre and customer experience (CX) solutions. One of the primary benefits is improved customer routing and problem-solving. Agile IVR systems that determine context by leveraging personal data and interaction histories to route callers more efficiently, delivering better experience outcomes from every interaction.

Integrating advanced natural language processing (NLP) solutions with generative AI enables more personalised customer interactions. These systems can better understand the intent and context behind customer inquiries, allowing for more natural, conversational engagements. This elevates the quality of the CX compared to traditional menu-based IVR systems. With these capabilities in place, automated journey mapping can route customers to the appropriate self-service channel, or escalate the call to the most relevant agent. By drawing on personal information and past interactions, these solutions can prioritize high-value customers and ensure they receive the appropriate level of attention and service.

Beyond routing, AI-powered capabilities also enable more efficient customer self-service. Chatbots and other digital channels infused with generative AI can understand diverse languages and dialects, expanding the accessibility and effectiveness of these automated support options. This helps keep simpler inquiries from live agents, improving overall operational efficiency.

Partnering for IVR modernisation success

Before starting any IVR modernisation journey, operators must conduct an in-depth assessment of the current system, with a focus on determining existing data sets and identifying pain points. It is also critical to surface journeys to assess the predominant type of demand and define which journeys an operator completely automates and which they don’t automate at all.

This differentiation is important because automating the wrong process or engagement can negatively impact CX while automating the right ones can deliver a significant return on investment (ROI) and other benefits. This is where the right technology partner can deliver significant value.

The Connect advantage

This section gives an overview of an AWS Partner, Connect, not to be mistaken with the Amazon Connect service from AWS.

An expert service provider like Connect with experience in the contact centre, CX and AI domains can help simplify the most intricate aspects of IVR modernisation. Using advanced AI technology, Connect assesses and analyses current IVR flows and scripts to uncover inefficiencies and offer actionable recommendations that help optimise performance. Armed with these tailored recommendations, Connect leverages its partnerships with technology providers like Amazon Connect as an AWS Advanced Tier partner to implement the most appropriate solution to address the identified challenges.

This implementation takes the form of a phased rollout migration, leveraging either a value-driven or time-driven approach. A value-driven approach is ideal for large, complex deployments. It entails a discovery stage, which analyses mined utterances from existing call recordings and tags intent and grammar files before cleaning and optimising the data for customer journey mapping, deriving data insights and for use in creating phrases for intent mapping.

The migration phase entails migrating what works and re-working the rest, with ongoing testing and tuning. The time-driven approach follows a lift and shift+ format driven by the suitability of the customer’s current voice journeys and how reusable they are, as well as the timeframe to completion. For instance, Connect can lift and shift a natural language platform like Nuance to Amazon Connect, integrating business applications to support self-service journeys if required. Ongoing testing also follows the migration.

Continual optimisation for sustained innovation

The ongoing testing in both approaches is a critical component in any IVR modernisation strategy as it drives continual optimisation. This process aims to continually update the IVR system’s dictionary with new information regarding the latest product releases or updates that customers use because your business typically changes faster than the technology you use in your business. As such, businesses need to continually optimise and train the language models used in their customer-focused IVR solutions.

Amazon Connect makes it possible to easily train and optimise these IVR solutions, ensuring the system understands the different contexts for a company’s ever-evolving product mix and the language used around these updates. Organizations can integrate the right mix of tools and features needed to create a powerful and complete solution to realise a their IVR modernisation strategy and CX objectives.

Early adoption possibilities

The speed with which Amazon Connect develops and brings to market new capabilities gives operators easier access to emerging trends in IVR technology, like voice biometrics for authentication. As IVR capabilities expand, modern systems are moving beyond basic engagements that provide information to facilitating personalised interactions that share personal information and support transactions.

However, the ability to embrace these advanced capabilities in future will depend on the IVR modernisation strategy companies embark on today. The first step in this journey is evaluating your legacy IVR systems and engaging with a technology partner that can plot the ideal IVR modernisation roadmap to address your specific challenges and unique CX needs. By embracing a cloud-based IVR modernisation approach, organisations can unlock the power of AI, ML, and generative AI to deliver more efficient, satisfying and personalised customer interactions to enhance CX and customer loyalty.