Chatbots and IVR — Customer Services Perspective

Arafat Tehsin
Chatbots Magazine
Published in
4 min readMay 16, 2017

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Responsive and good customer services are all about bringing customers back as they are the lifeline for your business. As the number of calls on contact center increase, organization deploys IVR (Interactive Voice Response) in order to reduce the human-cost and to deal with the primary customer service functions.

Notwithstanding the above strategy of deploying IVR, everyone understands the exasperation upon interacting with them. You come up with the simple question and then routed to the endless options until you press “0” to talk to someone who could actually understand your query in a precise way.

With the advent of AI powered chatbots, this longstanding problem has a possible solution. Despite a few disagreements on this notion, chatbots possess the potential to provide more natural, smoother and better customer experience (CX).

Understanding The Context

How many times were you able to get what you wanted from customer services while dealing with IVR? I asked the same question from at least 20 people and nearly 80% of them had a negative response. The most tedious aspect of IVR is to make it understand what your requirement is. As an alternative, it has the preloaded options to choose from, you cannot even say, ‘I want to talk to the customer sales or services agent’ till you wait a certain amount of minutes so your call could be redirected to one of the available agents.

On the other hand, chatbots are quite better in understanding your context. The software giants like Microsoft (and others like Google or Amazon) have done a tremendous job in bringing up the service like Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS) that easily helps developer get the intent of your conversation so you can directly tell the bot what you are looking for and it will take you to the applicable option.

For instance, you could call a bank and ask directly I would like to know about the offer on Loan — or more precisely, you could ask for Home Loan or you would like to meet relationship manager. All of these instances may not be understood by an IVR but the chatbot.

Chatbots Are Flexible

Getting the correct context and determining the proper goal of customer’s query is the primary goal of any customer service.

Real life conversations are not always linear. If you are communicating with one of the people in a bank (probably teller), he would be aware of the context even if you change the direction of discussion to other topics and respond you accordingly. Chatbots are just like that, flexible and natural.

If you notice, customer switched the context of discussion from meeting to the timing of the branch. Bot kept the context and responded back accurately. Later on, when the customer just wrote 6 PM right before the confirmation so the bot did not have to go back and come again with all the questions in a linear way. This is another unique feature of chatbots compared to the traditional IVR.

IVR systems work in a guided manner. They use static options to stream the conversation with you and they do not allow you to swerve from the actual flow. This flow does not influence the customer as compared to the natural one.

Potential Sales with Predictive Analysis

IVR is quite straightforward. It navigates you to the point that is already there in its option set and flow the conversation from there. IVR systems do not use any AI or machine learning to suggest something else based upon the customer’s objective or discussion.

In contrast, based upon having the context, non-linear dialogue communication capability and artificial intelligence power, chatbots have a feature to recommend something useful or informative for you. For example, as you’re trying to book a movie in IMAX and it suggests you some good dinner deals based upon your taste buds.

Since they are using the power of machine learning, they do not just suggest or recommend the best possible options but also improve themselves continuously for forthcoming communications.

Ordinarily, chatbots are flexible and they give you a feel of real person communicating with them because of their natural language understanding, contextual information management and so on. However, IVR are obstinate and do not allow customer to deviate from its context which do not maintain a natural composition during conversation.

Despite the slow adoption of this change among customer services platforms, chatbots are still growing and getting improved by the time. In my opinion, they are currently at a stage where they can easily handle the first encounters of the customers.

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Technology Enthusiast & Software Consultant. Love to code for Bots, Machine Learning & Cognitive Services.