Personalized IVR in a Digital World: Customer Success Stories

The proliferation of new digital channels presents organizations with two major challenges: the ability to provide a seamless customer experience, and the ability to control costs.

In the 1990s, voice was the main channel of choice. Customers started and ended their journey on a single channel. Today most customers start on the web and progress through multiple channels, only escalating to voice as a last resort. Therefore, the ability to track customer behavior across these channels and use that context to personalize the experience on each channel is fundamental to a great customer experience.

Personalized IVR helps by using context from previous channels and interactions, and tailoring the messaging and options toward each customer at a particular point in time. This reduces time spent on the IVR, increases self-service adoption, and improves routing efficiency for agent transfers.

Controlling Cost

More channels means more interactions and that means higher cost to serve. To control this cost, organizations are implementing new technologies that will increase self-service on voice and digital channels. These solutions include Virtual Assistants, MicroApps and Bots that effectively increase agent deflection.

In this blog, we will focus on the voice channel and how personalizing IVR can increase self-service. Look for upcoming blogs to cover our new digital self-service capabilities.

Let’s see how personalized IVR solved a wide range of problems at three different companies.

eir Standardizes And Contextualizes IVR

Moving from a state-owned to a shareholder-driven business, forced eir (formerly eircom) to compete in the global telecommunications market. One of the company’s major challenges was that its IT platforms, systems, and business processes operated in silos and were duplicated across the business. Multiple contact center legacy systems meant that it took months to make a change to a simple voice prompt. Over time, its speech-recognition IVR became overly complex as more rules and processes were layered on top to accommodate new services.

Ultimately, its IVR frustrated customers instead of assisting them, bringing down NPS scores. Improving NPS became a key driver for a major IVR improvement project.

eir used the Genesys App Automation Platform (GAAP) to standardize its self-service applications and provide a business user interface to maintain the applications and call flows. The company contextualized the IVR by letting Genesys applications access data from a range of sources and tailor the CX for every interaction. Personalization helped eir double self-service, improve routing, and provide much better CX. In fact, NPS scores increased within one month of going live with Genesys.

bpost Reduces Burden On IT With Personalized IVR

Responding quickly to changing needs was at the top of the list for what the Belgian Post Group (bpost) needed in a flexible IVR solution. As the leading postal operator in Belgium, bpost is a lifeline for many of its customers, including pensioners who expect their checks to arrive on a particular day. But during emergency situations, the company had no fast and effective way to inform customers of impacts to services.

bpost wanted to reduce the number of steps required to meet the real-time needs of customers, and future-proof its operations. Simplification would also make it easier for non-technical customer care staff to adapt the IVR system without IT assistance.

Working with a systems integrator, bpost implemented the Genesys App Automation Platform in just six weeks. eir gained the flexibility required for dynamic, personalized IVR. According to Jan Smets, bpost director of customer care, “Less restricted by technology and process, we can now start to think differently about real-time personalization and improvement to customer interactions.”

Achmea Consolidates Multiple Systems, Speeds Up Migration

Multiple acquisitions have helped Achmea grow into the leading insurance provider in the Netherlands. But these advances created a problem common to companies in similar situations. Achmea needed to consolidate IT products and IVR systems from more than 50 contact centers.

Even though many of them were using excellent IVR products, customers were experiencing differing levels of service. The company had no unified way to track customer journeys.

To gain that operational efficiency, Achmea consolidated onto a single telephony platform with an IVR platform on top. Using the Genesys App Automation Platform, it standardized all of its application building blocks. The result was faster project execution, while making their systems cheaper and easier to maintain. Achmea is moving all the decentralized routing to a centralized telephony environment—one location at a time.

“The Genesys solution provided us with a centralized solution and freed up the IT team to focus on other migration tasks,” says Bert Boesveld, architect of CC infrastructure for Achmea.

Because functional users maintain the IVR, Achmea had an operational efficiency business case in months rather than years.

Personalized IVR and the Future of CX

Almost all organizations today are focusing on digital transformation. But a digital strategy that lacks a personalized and dynamic IVR will have a disjointed CX. This will disappoint customers and negatively impact brand loyalty.

Self-service is becoming channel-agnostic, as seen in how organizations structure internal functions. For example, departments once responsible for voice only, often cover self-service across digital channels and vice versa.

Because of the omnichannel self-service approach and merging of responsibilities, tools help configure self-service dialogues once and deploy them on any channel in channel-appropriate ways. An agent should also be able to push these MicroApps to quickly solve customer queries. The Genesys App Automation Platform now supports Bots, Virtual Assistants and MicroApps, and self-service on traditional voice channels.

Creating a seamless CX with personalized IVR helps optimize your digital transformation and reduce the total cost of ownership. It can return major advantages compared to custom or silo-built solutions.

Start Your Transformation Today! 

Read the analyst case study on the eir transformation of its IVR systems. You’ll see how eir implemented advanced functionality driven by customer demands versus technical constraints.

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