For many contact centers and businesses, IVAs (Interactive Virtual Assistants) offer a better way to keep up with customer expectations and demands compared to IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems. This is mostly due to the fact that IVA tends to offer superior benefits and incorporate more of the latest technologies—including AI-enhanced features, customer relationship management (CRM) integrations, and real-time voice responses with a focus on dynamic call routing and self-service.
Meanwhile, as time goes on and people’s interactions with AI are becoming smoother and more comfortable, customers are also starting to expect companies to have IVAs.
Nevertheless, traditional IVR still serves a purpose for the contact centers of many businesses and organizations despite how it can be considered outdated. In any case, before you start using either system at your contact center, it’s a good idea to take a closer look at the differences between them, along with their best practices and relevant KPIs.
IVA vs. IVR: What’s the Difference?
While IVR uses pre-recorded voice prompts to interact with customers, IVA employs AI to provide personalized voice responses in real-time—just like a real conversation.
With IVR, callers interact by using touch-tone keypads or voice commands to navigate a fixed menu, allowing them to complete basic tasks and find information on their own. IVA, on the other hand, is a more advanced technology that uses AI and natural language processing (NLP) to provide personalized responses to callers. It uses natural language understanding (NLU) to process and understand what callers are saying, thus allowing it to provide a more complex response.
6 Reasons It Makes Sense to Go With IVA (and When it’s Right for You)
Although it’s neither a substitution for live agents nor a one-size-fits-all contact center solution, IVA technology offers a number of advantages over traditional IVR. Of course, the technology can still be limited by many factors, including:
- Difficult accents and uncommon dialects
- Unusual speech patterns
- Jargon and advanced vocabulary
- Loud noises
- Interruptions
- False insights
Even with its limitations, IVA still offers a great deal for most contact centers—especially those with at least 25 agents and those that require 24/7/365 support. In particular, there are six noteworthy (and KPI-boosting) benefits of using IVAs.
Fewer abandoned calls
With its callback technology and AI capabilities that allow it to process and understand a caller’s problems right away, IVA often leads to lower call abandonment rates. This, in turn, translates into higher rates of first call resolution and higher customer satisfaction overall.
Less agent turnover
Unlike traditional IVR menus, IVA can handle simple customer inquiries on its own, automating routine tasks and freeing up agents to focus on fewer yet more engaging interactions. This can lead to a more satisfied workforce, thus decreasing staff turnover and reducing the time and resources spent training new hires.
Greater customer satisfaction
IVA simplifies and streamlines the customer experience with its AI technology, callback capabilities, and self-service options—which can lead to speedier resolutions and fewer unresolved issues. Over time, this can lead to higher customer retention rates, greater customer loyalty, and improved customer lifetime value.
Expanded self-service abilities
If your contact center handles large volumes of routine inquiries like accepting payments, scheduling appointments, or looking up account information, IVA can take a lot of these tasks off the plates of your human agents. Meanwhile, if customers are able to solve their own problems quickly, they tend to be more satisfied.
Better compliance and security
IVA offers HIPAA-compliant and PCI-compliant services to gather data, process transactions, and collect sensitive information about customer accounts. These safe, secure, and legal data collecting abilities can serve as a major selling point for your customers—and for your business operations in general.
Increased scalability
With its ability to handle large call volumes and agile technology, IVA offers faster and increased scalability without the need to go through the time-intensive process of hiring the right amount of new agents.
When It (Still) Makes Sense to Go With IVR
While IVA is ideal for modern contact centers, IVR can still work for smaller contact centers (under 25 agents) that don’t have a wide array of specializations and departments.
For example, if your company has very few customer support tasks that can be automated and you only need your phone system to direct calls to a couple of areas, an IVR may be enough to satisfy your needs.
Contact centers using IVR in this scenario should still be aware of its limitations, including the lack of a more personalized service, which can lead to more abandoned calls.
Best Practices: How to Get the Most Out of IVA or IVR
Whether you go with IVA or IVR, it’s important to be aware of the general best practices to provide a more optimized customer journey, improve customer satisfaction, and help take the burden off your live agents.
Ensure clear and concise messaging
For both IVA and IVR, be sure that your messaging is clear, concise, and simple. Your menu options should be straightforward and intuitive so that your customer journey is efficient and user-friendly.
As a general rule of thumb, your main menu should include a maximum of five options, while each submenu should be limited to three or fewer. It’s also important to provide a way to speak with an agent at all times.
Think like your customers
When designing your IVR or IVA system, put yourself in your caller’s shoes and think about their most common pain points, what types of questions they’re likely to have, and what they might be calling about. Map out a menu with a routing network that minimizes transfers and maximizes the chances of a first call resolution.
Before making any changes, remember to test your IVR or IVA system with a small focus group so you can gather feedback on how well it works. You want a system that is technically-sound and user-friendly.
Make it simple to request a live agent
While IVR and IVA technology is certainly exciting and holds a lot of promise for businesses and organizations of all sizes, don’t forget the human element. Make sure that requesting a live agent is a main menu option, as some callers may have a question or request that can’t be answered by your IVR or IVA system’s self-service prompts. Other customers may simply prefer to speak to a human no matter what.
Use clear and natural-sounding recordings
Even though AI technology has become pretty good at replicating human voices, make sure you select the most realistic-sounding one available—or hire a voice actor for your fixed IVR menu options. This way, conversations with your callers will be more natural, putting them at ease and leading to higher resolution rates. Focus groups and soft launches for testing are solid options for ensuring that your system’s voice is the right one for your business or organization.
Offer multiple languages
Don’t forget to offer multiple language options for your IVR or IVA system so that callers from diverse backgrounds can get the help they need quickly and easily. This can lead to higher customer satisfaction and a wider reach for your business.
Relevant KPIs to Keep an Eye On
Using an IVA or IVR in your contact center should be goal-oriented and metric-driven so that you can evaluate their impact and return on investment. Keep the following KPIs for both technologies in mind:
- Call resolution rate
- Average call length
- Transfer rate
- Call abandonment rate and the percentage of calls during which a live agent was requested
How to Start Using IVA or IVR in Your Call Center
The simplest way to start using an IVA or IVR is to purchase or subscribe to contact center software with integrations and helpful features that can be used to optimize the experience for your customers and contact center agents.
For example, many of the best VoIP phone services offer advanced integrations and features that can work in conjunction with IVA and IVR to maximize their effectiveness. These include abilities related to language processing, sentiment analysis, smart call routing, and voice biometrics, and more.
By combining all of these capabilities, a VoIP service offers benefits such as improved customer service, faster call resolution time, and more useful data collection and analysis. Choosing the right one for you depends on the specific features it offers at a given price point, so weigh your options and request a demo from any provider you think might be a good fit.