When researching to find the right IVA platform to elevate customer experience and boost contact center efficiency, you’ll develop a list of wants, needs, and deal-breakers when it comes to IVA capabilities. But even with IVAs that meet most of your criteria, you may not realize what you’ll miss out on—or the challenges ahead—when you select an off-the-shelf solution rather than an end-to-end partner that can provide a bespoke, white-glove approach.
At Interactions, we take a different approach to successful IVA implementation and support. First, we only get paid for successfully handled transactions. It’s in our best interest to take a hands-on approach to ensure optimal implementation and continuous improvement. There’s no monthly or annual fee that you pay regardless of value. (On average, enterprises wasted $18 million on unused software last year. Few businesses can afford another disappointing implementation.)
Let’s look at a few more ways PaaS IVAs can deliver more complexity than value.
The build
Many IVA platform-as-a-service vendors provide the tools you need, but then leave it to the business to build out the solution. For example, they may offer an AI model tuned for particular industries and sample dialogues and workflows for finance, retail, healthcare, or other industries, but then you are left either using this model as is or customizing it yourself for your specific business needs. They may also offer streamlined integrations to common CRM, payment, and contact center systems, but less help with building and maintaining uncommon integration points.
Expertise needs
To build out an off-the-shelf solution, you need Conversational AI and integration expertise, but many companies lack these roles in their current talent pool. Hiring people with the expertise you need can be challenging due to high demand. If you do have the resources and ability to hire for these roles, they likely have implemented Conversational AI at one or two companies.
While this expertise isn’t anything to sniff at, it still lacks when compared to the depth of knowledge that an IVA solution team with dozens of clients and two decades of experience has. Challenges that can stall a project with a smaller and less experienced implementation team — uncommon integrations, model optimization, industry- or company-specific data security requirements — have likely already been faced and solved. Working with a team like Interactions also prevents knowledge gaps when internal experts leave.
Discovery and implementation
Implementation with an off-the-shelf solution may include self-guided materials and documentation and some hours of assistance for a near-DIY build. At Interactions, our team guides begins with a thorough discovery phase. We work closely with your team to understand your personas and goals, listen to calls to draw out insights, and analyze your business rules to develop an IVA that matches your brand’s voice. With experts who have worked with dozens of clients and at contact centers themselves, we can provide in-depth guidance and insight based on best practices and past learnings. We then build out functional requirement documents, translating goals, requirements, and design into functions that we build out, including flows, prompts, logic, business rules, and integration points.
This hands-on approach gives your company the opportunity to voice needs that may not be supported with an off-the-shelf solution, such as hyper-specific data storage and use requirements, atypical integration challenges, and bespoke reporting needs.
Effective from day one
With off-the-shelf solutions, you have to improve your results through customer-facing failures. You take calls, measure KPIs, figure out what went wrong when there’s low intent accuracy or unimproved containment rates, and then figure out how to fix the issues and optimize the solution.
On day one, Interactions IVAs handle more calls with much higher accuracy through a seamless blend of AI and human understanding. When an Interactions IVA can’t understand what a caller is saying at a high confidence rate, that snippet is sent to a human agent in real time. The agent interprets the information for the IVA in the background of the call. It enables us to deliver up to 97% accuracy and a more human-like experience, as well as complete a wider array of self-service transactions that would otherwise require agent assistance.
As our human agents interpret utterances that IVA can’t understand, such as calls with background noise, an accented speaker, or a lengthy request, they are essentially labeling that data. This information is fed back into the application in real time, making it more accurate.
When an off-the-shelf solution can’t understand speech, callers are asked to repeat information, get escalated into a live agent queue, or hang up in frustration. It’s then up to the company to ferret out those failed calls to try to figure out what happened. Interactions learns where failure points would have been and fixes them in real time. Then, using those learnings, the IVA is automatically optimized to avoid those common failure points in the future.
Analytics and continued optimization
Without an active customer success team by your side, your business only has its own singular point of view when studying analytics to derive insights and areas for improvement. Interactions has a deep bench of customers we’ve been working with for many years, so we can identify insights and areas of improvement that may never have occurred to you.
We have eight reports out of the box, as well as the ability to customize reporting at any point of the engagement. With any data point in Interactions reporting, you can drill down to listen to the individual call (with PII redacted). Our customer success team also keeps on top of your analytics to see trends and identify areas of improvement. Through weekly calls, we can closely collaborate with your analytics and call center teams to keep your solution humming.
For example, our human agents will tag intents that do not have a dialog flow with “no match” as they keep the call going. We examine those “no match” intents to learn if new dialogs need to be developed or if there are other ways we can efficiently help your customers.
No roadmap surprises
Finally, with an off-the-shelf solution, you may be stuck with roadmap changes that suit the majority of clients (or the business’s bottom line), but not your use cases. With Interactions, when we investigate or roll out a new feature, we typically ask current customers for their opinion of the feature and if they want to collaborate to really make sure the feature will help push their CX and efficiency forward and bring more value to their IVA.
Overall, an off-the-shelf solution may seem like a quick fix for your current lackluster voice or chat solution, it can be challenging to derive the full value you need to transform customer experiences and to gain deep efficiencies in your contact center. Interactions works side-by-side with customers from day one to ensure a smooth, worry-free implementation and continuous improvement, so that you can stay focused on what matters — your customers.
To learn more about how Interactions IVA delivers more value through a blend of human and AI capabilities, download our free guide.
