Visual IVRs and the Smartphone

One of the newer trends in the last year+ that I have been keeping my eye on quite a bit for customer service technology has been the movement towards so called "Visual IVRs".  The concept is pretty simple, take the idea of an IVR, or a phone tree as some would call it, and craft it into a visual mechanism either on a mobile device or on a website.  The idea is that companies would still get the caller to where they really need to go the first time and customer would not have to endure the endless prompts and frustrations of speech recognition on their way to an agent.  Theoretically, everyone wins.

There have been a few companies in this space that have been pioneers or leaders in bringing this concept to market and have done a nice job in doing so.  First, Fonolo has been one of the companies that is on the leading edge of this trend.  They first started out as a company that focused primarily on Virtual Holding type of technology where I can grab a place in line in the queue but hang up and wait for a call back when an agent frees up.  But soon thereafter, they started rethinking that model a bit and added some visual prompts to their solution so that customers could actually do all the work that is traditionally done in a voice IVR, from a visual interface on their mobile phone or on a website.

Another player in this space today is Jacada.  About a year or so ago, they took one of their existing products called the Jacada Interaction Manager and began to rethink how it could be applied to customer facing activities on mobile devices.  They have done a nice job in taking things a step further by working to make the experience on the mobile phone or website more self service help based before then moving to the Visual IVR experience.  Think troubleshooting on a mobile device that then takes you immediately to the right place in a phone queue if you are unable to solve your problem with the help of the troubleshooting tool.  Pretty slick concept and they are having good success in the market place.

I am a big fan of this trend towards more visual experiences.  They are just flat out faster for customers, more useful for customers and when done right, they are actually more likely to deflect the transfer to the voice queue than traditional self service approaches, especially on mobile devices.

With the limited success so far of these smaller brands and companies in this space, there has been the obvious rush to the market by all of the other players in the call center market/customer service technology market.  So, soon, this technology too will be another feature that exists in everyone's bag of tricks.  Which is somewhat sad to me, as that is when innovation tends to stop and the big companies move on to the next big thing.

Take a look at the smaller guys in this space though, as they are doing some really innovative things that, in my mind, will dramatically improve your customer's experience with your brand.  Especially on mobile devices, as this is still a place that brands have not thought enough about.