interactIVResponse
IVR Development Tips – #4 Use Technology to Enhance Your IVR Application
By Nicole Reid, Marketing Communications Specialist, Pronexus
Using technology that enhances your IVR application and allows the user to accomplish what they need to do is the key to a successful IVR system. Technology like text-to speech (TTS) or automatic speech recognition can help the user to navigate your system easier and quicker, resulting in a lower caller abandonment rate.
Why Use Text-to-speech?
When you want to personalize your dialogue with customers, it's almost impossible to record every possible message combination. Greeting customers by their name? Informing customers of why their plane has been delayed? Text-to-speech allows you to read any text out loud without knowing the vocabulary, the names, the numbers or codes contained in the text. Phrases can be adjusted by speed, pitch, volume, pace and inflection to convey a particular mood, urgency and/or clarity required.
Text-to-speech allows you to cut the cost of voice driven applications by reducing or eliminating the need for pre-recorded prompts, while adding flexibility and speed to service of your application.
Why Use Speech Recognition?
Automatic speech recognition allows a computer to identify the words that a person speaks into a telephone. Most people can speak much faster than they can type, which means ASR can help move the caller through your IVR quicker.
ASR replaces the need for customers to respond to long lists of possible choices, or enter complex dates, times, etc. With ASR the process is faster, less demanding and there is less chance of error.
If you haven’t already, evaluate your IVR to determine whether text-to-speech or ASR would be beneficial to your callers. Get an advantage over the competition! With increased efficiency and improved customer service, you’ll have the flexibility to offer new services and increase customer loyalty.
IVR Development Tips – #4 Use Technology to Enhance Your IVR Application
Good point on using TTS for personalization. When thinking about TTS, many people think of yesteryear’s “robotic” voices but the reality is that the technology has evolved in bounds and leaps. These days the voices are very life-like and the cost of TTS has come down too.