With the all round cost of employing a customer service representative averaging around £20,000 a year, it's easy to see why operators are looking to supplement their live agent resources with automated self service options - either on-line across the Internet or by using fax-on-demand or interactive voice response (IVR) technology.

Benchmark Portal estimates that the average contact centre handles around 15% of customer contacts on a self-service basis - which in monetary terms can mean big cost savings. If one was to assume that IVR reduces live agent occupation by one minute per call in a 100 seat call center, for example, with agents handling an average of 10 calls per hour - then the cost savings from IVR alone could be in the region of £250,000 p.a.

Self-service applications are often very easy to set up and can prove highly effective in action. Internet-based self-service functions, for example, very much fall into this category. Simply advertise your web site details or direct individuals to your web site, provide an effective search engine, and web surfers can pick out the information they require or leave orders, requests etc. that can be answered in non-real time. The pressure is not on to deploy call centre agents to give instant responses. Fax-on-demand services are also relatively easy to set up and don't usually require the intervention of human operators.

Setting up effective IVR applications, though, is a somewhat trickier business. Firstly, because certain callers will initially feel uncomfortable speaking to a voice processing system and would prefer to be speaking to a live agent. Secondly, because some 'technophobic' callers will feel they don't understand how to interact with the system. And thirdly, because callers will have had bad experiences in the past dealing with badly set up automated voice processing services.

The solution to all of these problems is to make callers feel comfortable with the service, to give them the information they require and to keep the customer interaction as short and effective as possible. If callers using your IVR service feel they can achieve what they set out to when they picked up the phone and are treated in a sympathetic manner, they will generally be happy to use the service again. If the service is badly scripted and/or they fail to get the information they require, the experience will reflect badly on both your call centre and your organisation's image. It's not rocket science.

In reality, most call centre operators have cottoned on to this - and more care than ever before is being put into how services are scripted, the methods of interaction employed (with an increasing number of services starting to employ large vocabulary speech recognition systems allowing callers to say what they want), and the type of services offered via IVR.

Many of today's IVR services also give callers access to live agents with a single command (e.g. 'say five or press five on your telephone keypad at any time to speak to an operator') giving the caller control of the call, yet still overall reducing the time agents need to spend on the phone talking to callers with simple/ mundane requests. Other features of advanced IVR platforms for the call centre such as C3's Apcentia Customer Self Serve include permanent/ random call recording, live supervisor monitoring and real time and historical reporting.

Information provided via call centre IVR services today commonly includes: opening hours, timetables, store/ office location details, private information (such as banking details), sensitive personal information (such as health information on medical conditions), and 'voice form' information that can be filled in by the caller. As people get more familiar with IVR, we are also starting to see more complex services being introduced such as self-service technical repair, cinema/ theatre booking, and telephone polling/ research services, automated ordering and payment, balance enquiries and timetable information.

Make no mistake, IVR is here to stay. Whatever is said about eEverything, providing an IVR option will remain an essential part of providing customer choice. If customers are kings, they must be allowed to access services when they want and how they want - and that includes providing phone, Web, email and fax access 24 hours a day/ 365 days a year.

The real issue today is not whether IVR services should be available - it is how they should be set up. To date, if companies wanted to provide a single service with the option of accessing that service via fax, Internet or IVR, they would typically have bought multiple systems and written separate applications on each system from scratch.

Today, the same can essentially be achieved on one 'converged technology' system, with the application being written once only but accessed via different media (phone, fax. e-mail etc.). and with all media sharing the same database, directory and other platform resources. In this way, as services evolve and information is updated, only one central database will need to be updated - bringing huge efficiency savings.

Call centre operators can also look to converged technology systems to enrich the service experience. In other words, when different call centre applications are unlinked, it is not uncommon for callers to experience long hold times, endless voice menus and be forced to repeat the same information to different staff. Using 'converged technology' systems, however, call centre functions can be linked in order to intelligently track and route customer calls and Internet transactions. Rather than being met with a "Good morning, how can I help you?", callers can be greeted "Good morning Mrs Smith, I understand you have a problem with your washing machine", making your agents sound smarter and the duration of customer service calls fall.

Efficiently handing customer calls is all about improving the customer experience. And IVR has an important part to play in achieving this in call centres today - just as it will in 5 and 10 years time.

About the Company
C3 Ltd is a European supplier of NT-based converged communications platforms for call handling and e-business applications. The company has installed over 200 000 lines of computer telephony technology world-wide for: prepaid telephony, emergency call out, IVR, speech recognition, call centre/contact centre, virtual call centre, voicemail and automated solutions since its founding in 1990.