Should you switch from IVR to AI voice assistants?

If you use an IVR system today to support customer calls, you may wonder what’s different about AI-powered voice assistants, and if they can help you.

Here, we’ll walk you through the key advantages, along with questions to help you determine if an AI voice assistant like Avoca could give your business a boost.

Common issues with IVR

IVR lets you scale. But you may have run into these common issues:

• Customer confusion with many options: When you have many options for customers to choose from, the IVR tree becomes long or nested—it’s a law of physics. This makes the tree hard and slow for customers to navigate. So more customers give up on self-serve options, which puts more demand on human operator support. Not to mention, it increases a customer’s frustration before they even talk to you.
• Difficulty handling spikes in requests: IVR systems have limited ability to answer a wide variety of commonly asked questions and serve requests end-to-end. Typically, this means during spikes in requests, you need more staff on hand to handle all requests, or you risk dropping the ball with customers. And there are long wait times even for simple questions or requests.
• Missed business and low CSAT: When customers can’t find their way through an IVR tree, or they get put on even brief hold for a quick question, they often hang up.

New capabilities with AI

AI-powered voice assistants alleviate these common issues with IVR. They’re more advanced than IVR in two main ways:

• Inputs: AI assistants understand natural conversation—and thus a wide variety of requests. A traditional IVR system understands just a few pre-set words or phrases.
• Outputs: AI assistants can generate complex, targeted responses based on a knowledge base about your business.

Here’s how these advancements work for you.

Route customers, fast

Customers can tell an AI-powered voice assistant directly what they want, as if they were talking to a human. No need to go through menu 1, and press 2, then menu 2, and press 3, and so on. Connect customers with what they want, fast.

Questions to consider: Do we have multiple layers of options for callers to navigate?

Offer the most natural end-user experience

AI-powered voice assistants engage in natural conversations with customers, and handle follow-up questions, clarifications, and context across multiple turns.

Questions to consider: Do we want to lead our industry in customer experience?

Respond with relevant, targeted information

AI-powered voice assistants handle complex requests that don’t have to fit an exact script.

As a simple example, you might have your hours of operations pre-recorded, but what if customers want to know if you’re open on a specific holiday (not just the one coming up)?

This type of question is ideally one you can answer without having to update your phone system. And this type of question is in many cases best answered by automation—both to value your staff’s time, and to answer the customer as quickly as possible.

Questions to consider: How much of our call volume comes from commonly asked questions? Do these interruptions take up significant time and attention from our staff?

Pick up for customers 24/7

An under-appreciated aspect of using AI voice assistants is that they never sleep. While they can’t handle every type of request, they can do a lot more than IVR—and at all hours of the day.

For example, if a prospective customer calls after hours, instead of sending them to voicemail, you could have your AI voice assistant intelligently answer questions about your offering, and take down their information so you can follow up.

Questions to consider: How many calls do we get after hours? How many of these could be potential customers that we’re missing?

Want to learn more?

Avoca’s AI-powered customer communications platform means you can pick up 24/7 for high-intent prospects, scale customer support while managing costs, and increase support CSAT.

Book a chat with us to see the demo. If it's not a fit, we'll leave you with recommendations for other paths to pursue, so you leave with some value.