The IVR: The Gift that Keeps on Giving?
When Voxeo announced their latest round of $9M last week, some of the headlines referred to them as an IVR company. IVR? Seemed like an understatement for a company that has not so quietly become a small powerhouse in next generation voice deployments. And for one that recently added innovative IM solutions to their platforms so that developers and customers alike can optimize multi-modal customer interactions.
But I digress. More remarkable is that, upon reflection, we have now used this same term (IVR) to describe the process of a human interacting with a computer, through a telephone interface for over 20 years! In this day in age, one almost expects new verbiage. Boring, old terminology aside, there's been no shortage of innovation in the core IVR space, no lack of funding and plenty of new business created along the way. Hence, I give you 'the gift than keeps on giving'.
A Phone + A Computer ='d Endless Opportunity
I've had my share of experiences around bringing IVR-related offerings to market, including selling them. In the early 90's, I was charged with moving some of the earliest IVR's - where we literally sat in front of a DOS screen and showed the client the dynamic relationship between the phone and the PC. They marveled as we told them proudly that now, since it was a connected to a 'computer', we could make it do anything.
This era led to many deployments of creative uses of IVR (remember, the first online dating was inside of an IVR, not a browser). It also led to plenty of unhappy callers making their way through poorly designed interfaces. Opportunity knocked and a whole sub-market of caller experience VAR's sprouted, adding a critical layer of value that helped the IVR gain wider acceptance.
Enter Speech to fix all that ailed the touch-tone IVR?
Notwithstanding the improved processes around deploying the DTMF-driven IVR's, the caller backlashes continued. Then speech technology arrived, hailed as the all-be (I know; I hailed it to partners and customers for 6 years). It would forever change the IVR we told people, flattening those dreaded menus and giving people what they really wanted: to speak to machines like they spoke to people.
Not so fast. Make no mistake, speech has and will continue to revolutionize many forms of interaction in automated environments. But it's also one the most complex - if the not the most complex - technology I have been associated with it. So many uncontrollable variables (ever try to talk to a machine with music playing in the background?), that ultimately market penetration has been shallower that we all had hoped. Yet, the IVR market remained and grew because of speech. The speech enabled IVR, that is.
A small lull seemed to take place in the IVR market - outside of the speech growth - in the early part of the decade. The market had matured, even commoditized in some areas and the costs for large projects has become unwieldy for smaller to midsize companies. The professional services alone around integration and design could sink a project before it started. Was the rose was finally off the IVR?
Thank you, Hosted.
It looked that way to me. Case in point, in late 2006 when I was fortunate enough to begin consulting with Ifbyphone, when their founder Irv Shapiro was telling anyone that would listen that he would revolutionize the IVR market. The IVR market, the VC would ask? Even I was guilty of suggesting to Irv that we may want to tone down that term a little. Well, we had an ace in the hole - the word 'hosted', placed before 'IVR'. And if that didn't turn people on then, it sure does now as evidenced by Ifbyphone's skyrocketing growth. In fact, in retrospect putting the IVR into the cloud has given it more life than anyone could have expected. Except for Irv, maybe.
Fast forward and the good old IVR is really at the center of the Voice API/Mashup explosion. After all, many of those offered by newer companies like Twilio, CloudVox and others are in fact modern versions of interacting with a computer's database - through a telephone interface. Maybe that's why they still call Voxeo an IVR company :-).
Fix the Customer Experience, Please.
This all brings me to one last point. While the IVR has spawned innovation of late, is automating processes for small and big companies alike that we once never imagined possible, one thing has remained constant: People don't love calling into them. Ask people on the street if they like phone menus - today or twenty years ago - and the response would be equally guttural.
Why is this? We've learned so much over the years and added a variety of end user friendly features. Do designers make them unwieldy on purpose? Not for the most part. No, the reason is simple: the telephone user interface (also known as the TUI and the dial pad) was never ever intended as a navigation device. Even less so as our phone pads got smaller.
And one other reason. There's a unintuitive relationship between the back end and front end of an IVR (in a call center environment at least). The back end - the ability to distribute calls in a optimal way and based on business rules, is mission critical to running a call center. But in order to do that you have to adequately triage your callers at the front end. Net result: If you triage too much, the caller is annoyed. If you don't triage enough, the call center runs inefficiently.
Enter Fonolo, my newest client (yes, this is a small plug. I don't do it often). Fonolo is an enterprise-focused, customer experience solution that converts the conventional over-the-phone IVR interaction (listening, pressing, listening, pressing) to a fully visual one. By crawling and indexing entire phone trees, then presenting them visually on company websites in simple click-to buttons, Fonolo is optimizing the the IVR one step further by removing its one key friction: customer unhappiness. It puts control into the hands of the caller, through today's most common interface - the Web (desktop or mobile).
Fonolo is not the anti-IVR. Quite the contrary. The IVR is not going anywhere; it's too important to running efficient call centers. Rather, Fonolo's visual dialing aims to make the IVR even more pervasive. That happens to technology when end users - and not only companies - like using it.
You see. The IVR has really been and will continue to be the gift that keeps on giving. And again, hats off the great team at Voxeo. Rasing money in 2009 is one thing. Doing it in Florida, is altogether another.
But I digress. More remarkable is that, upon reflection, we have now used this same term (IVR) to describe the process of a human interacting with a computer, through a telephone interface for over 20 years! In this day in age, one almost expects new verbiage. Boring, old terminology aside, there's been no shortage of innovation in the core IVR space, no lack of funding and plenty of new business created along the way. Hence, I give you 'the gift than keeps on giving'.
A Phone + A Computer ='d Endless Opportunity
I've had my share of experiences around bringing IVR-related offerings to market, including selling them. In the early 90's, I was charged with moving some of the earliest IVR's - where we literally sat in front of a DOS screen and showed the client the dynamic relationship between the phone and the PC. They marveled as we told them proudly that now, since it was a connected to a 'computer', we could make it do anything.
This era led to many deployments of creative uses of IVR (remember, the first online dating was inside of an IVR, not a browser). It also led to plenty of unhappy callers making their way through poorly designed interfaces. Opportunity knocked and a whole sub-market of caller experience VAR's sprouted, adding a critical layer of value that helped the IVR gain wider acceptance.
Enter Speech to fix all that ailed the touch-tone IVR?
Notwithstanding the improved processes around deploying the DTMF-driven IVR's, the caller backlashes continued. Then speech technology arrived, hailed as the all-be (I know; I hailed it to partners and customers for 6 years). It would forever change the IVR we told people, flattening those dreaded menus and giving people what they really wanted: to speak to machines like they spoke to people.
Not so fast. Make no mistake, speech has and will continue to revolutionize many forms of interaction in automated environments. But it's also one the most complex - if the not the most complex - technology I have been associated with it. So many uncontrollable variables (ever try to talk to a machine with music playing in the background?), that ultimately market penetration has been shallower that we all had hoped. Yet, the IVR market remained and grew because of speech. The speech enabled IVR, that is.
A small lull seemed to take place in the IVR market - outside of the speech growth - in the early part of the decade. The market had matured, even commoditized in some areas and the costs for large projects has become unwieldy for smaller to midsize companies. The professional services alone around integration and design could sink a project before it started. Was the rose was finally off the IVR?
Thank you, Hosted.
It looked that way to me. Case in point, in late 2006 when I was fortunate enough to begin consulting with Ifbyphone, when their founder Irv Shapiro was telling anyone that would listen that he would revolutionize the IVR market. The IVR market, the VC would ask? Even I was guilty of suggesting to Irv that we may want to tone down that term a little. Well, we had an ace in the hole - the word 'hosted', placed before 'IVR'. And if that didn't turn people on then, it sure does now as evidenced by Ifbyphone's skyrocketing growth. In fact, in retrospect putting the IVR into the cloud has given it more life than anyone could have expected. Except for Irv, maybe.
Fast forward and the good old IVR is really at the center of the Voice API/Mashup explosion. After all, many of those offered by newer companies like Twilio, CloudVox and others are in fact modern versions of interacting with a computer's database - through a telephone interface. Maybe that's why they still call Voxeo an IVR company :-).
Fix the Customer Experience, Please.
This all brings me to one last point. While the IVR has spawned innovation of late, is automating processes for small and big companies alike that we once never imagined possible, one thing has remained constant: People don't love calling into them. Ask people on the street if they like phone menus - today or twenty years ago - and the response would be equally guttural.
Why is this? We've learned so much over the years and added a variety of end user friendly features. Do designers make them unwieldy on purpose? Not for the most part. No, the reason is simple: the telephone user interface (also known as the TUI and the dial pad) was never ever intended as a navigation device. Even less so as our phone pads got smaller.
And one other reason. There's a unintuitive relationship between the back end and front end of an IVR (in a call center environment at least). The back end - the ability to distribute calls in a optimal way and based on business rules, is mission critical to running a call center. But in order to do that you have to adequately triage your callers at the front end. Net result: If you triage too much, the caller is annoyed. If you don't triage enough, the call center runs inefficiently.
Enter Fonolo, my newest client (yes, this is a small plug. I don't do it often). Fonolo is an enterprise-focused, customer experience solution that converts the conventional over-the-phone IVR interaction (listening, pressing, listening, pressing) to a fully visual one. By crawling and indexing entire phone trees, then presenting them visually on company websites in simple click-to buttons, Fonolo is optimizing the the IVR one step further by removing its one key friction: customer unhappiness. It puts control into the hands of the caller, through today's most common interface - the Web (desktop or mobile).
Fonolo is not the anti-IVR. Quite the contrary. The IVR is not going anywhere; it's too important to running efficient call centers. Rather, Fonolo's visual dialing aims to make the IVR even more pervasive. That happens to technology when end users - and not only companies - like using it.
You see. The IVR has really been and will continue to be the gift that keeps on giving. And again, hats off the great team at Voxeo. Rasing money in 2009 is one thing. Doing it in Florida, is altogether another.