5 real benefits of conversational IVR for call centers

Conversational IVR uses natural language processing and automatic speech recognition to understand what customers are saying, typically in the context of a customer support request.

While conversational IVR has been around for more than two decades, recent advances in artificial intelligence have expanded the possibilities for intuitive, natural, and useful phone conversations. Unfortunately, new technology often comes with hype.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through the proven benefits of conversational IVR and debunk some common myths.

5 Real Benefits of Conversational IVR

If you’ve ever called a customer support line, you’ve experienced navigating a maze of IVR prompts only to end up having to repeat your question to an agent. Fortunately, conversational IVR breaks that cycle and enables a natural, conversation-based interaction.

Here are some of the key benefits of streamlining customer support with conversational IVR.

1. Simplify caller navigation

Traditional IVR systems rely on cumbersome menu prompts, requiring callers to “Press 1 for sales, press 2 for support…” to express their needs.

It turns out that callers typically navigate up to four levels of menus before opting out of speaking to an agent. This tortuous navigation often results in misrouted requests, duplicate calls, and abandoned support interactions.

Conversational IVR bypasses these overly complex paths by allowing callers to express their requests in a conversational manner using natural language.

Rather than navigating menus, customers can simply ask their questions. Whether checking the status of an order or requesting a refund, callers get to the right resolution faster, with less transfers and frustration.

This simplified navigation not only makes operations easier for callers, but it also optimizes resource allocation in the background to ensure your contact center runs smoothly.

2. Make customers feel more natural

If wading through confusing menu trees isn’t enough, most traditional IVRs come with pre-built automated support sequences that slowly guide users to the right support agent. While these defaults technically get the job done, they lack the personalization that can take the quality of your customer support from good to great.

Conversational IVR uses automatic speech recognition and natural language processing to provide a natural, human interface.

Instead of pressing a button to reach the appropriate support agent, callers can simply speak their request as if they were talking to a real person. The IVR will talk to the customer until the support request is resolved.

This human-mimicking conversation keeps support conversations moving smoothly by answering questions in the right context rather than based on button presses.

By removing these mechanical menu barriers and replacing them with an intelligent, human-like voice, your customers will feel heard and cared for.

3. Improve efficiency through automation

With a conversational IVR, you’ll never have to worry about answering repetitive support questions or common inquiries again.

For questions like “What’s my account balance?” or “When will my order ship?” it will automatically interpret the intent and extract the necessary data to resolve the request without the need for agent assistance.

This automation capability offloads simple calls from human agents, significantly reducing monotonous task handling and allowing your support reps to focus on higher-level, more complex interactions.

Even better, natural language models continue to improve over time. Once an IVR system has learned how to answer your most common questions, over 50% of your inbound call volume can be fully automated.

4. Personalization based on caller profile

If the powerful automation features aren’t enough to convince you that conversational IVR is miles ahead of traditional IVR systems, the integration capabilities certainly will.

By integrating the IVR system with your CRM, product inventory records, ERP platform, etc., the IVR can access the latest data to provide accurate, personalized responses to callers.

These types of backend integrations allow your automated phone system to pull real-time order status, account details, shipping dates, and similar helpful information that customers often request over the phone.

This personal touch lets callers know they’re more than just a number—they’re actually important to your business.

For example, when asking about order status, a conversational IVR can reference the specific products purchased, shipping destination, and estimated delivery time based on the integrated order record.

5. Understand complex issues

When callers ask complex questions, need clarification of answers, or expect personalized responses, traditional IVR systems fall short. These systems were not built with this level of personalization in mind.

But by applying natural language processing, neural networks, and machine learning, conversational IVR can interpret complex, nuanced inquiries across multiple topics. The difference is huge.

Whether a customer is asking to make changes to an existing order and check loyalty points, or trying to book a trip with reference to a previous trip, a conversational IVR can handle these nuances with ease.

These systems can also clarify answers through back-and-forth conversations without losing context or becoming frustrated.

By studying customer record data from all recorded customer calls, conversational IVRs will better understand multi-intent requests, analyze customer sentiment, and resolve support requests through intuitive, intelligent conversations.

4 Conversational IVR Myths

While conversational IVR promises to revolutionize the customer support experience, that doesn’t mean it’s limitless and without any downsides. In this section, we’ll debunk some of the myths surrounding conversational IVR and point out areas where it might be creating more work for your support team rather than saving time.

1. Conversational IVR is easy to deploy

Some conversational IVR vendors tout quick and easy deployment. But designing an intelligent IVR system that’s personalized to your team’s needs involves more than just basic software installation.

Correctly interpreting customer intent requires a significant amount of upfront development. Conversational IVR systems must analyze call transcripts, identify common queries and topics, tag them as “intent,” and map the IVR conversation flow before anything goes live.

While you can push it without all of this, this will only result in a worse customer support experience than what your customers experience through a traditional IVR system.

Integration challenges can also add to deployment delays. If you want to get real-time data to assist customers, your conversational IVR system needs to integrate with contact center infrastructure such as ACD, customer data CRM, payment systems, inventory databases, etc.

Building these integrations takes time to test end-to-end before rolling them out at scale.

While the long-term benefits of conversational IVR far outweigh the costs, organizations should expect these systems to require months of development, testing, and fine-tuning before they can deliver a positive return on investment.

In other words, there are no shortcuts to improving customer support.

2. It has human-level conversational capabilities 24/7

Some conversational IVR vendors claim to provide seamless, human-like interactions. But even advanced natural language systems have difficulty replicating and understanding everyday human speech.

Without any life experience or cultural awareness, IVRs often misunderstand slang, sarcasm, niche references, and requests that require emotional intelligence.

While modern neural networks can accurately identify intent and entities in certain contexts, they often fall short in situations where complex personalization is required. For example, while humans can easily switch between topics, IVRs rely on rigid dialogue trees.

AI-enhancement is great for assisting support personnel, but it’s not designed to replace them. Any promise of full, scalable automation across all conversation scenarios is still years away from reality.

3. Self-service coverage is close to universal

Some conversational IVR vendors may imply that nearly all callers’ needs can be resolved without human assistance, but this is simply not the case.

Actual control rates using conversational IVR are reported to be higher than with traditional IVR systems. While this is impressive, it is a far cry from end-to-end customer support automation.

Instead, contact centers should be designed with a balance of automation and staff augmentation in mind. This hybrid approach is ultimately the best way to balance managing costs, expectations, and customer experience.

4. You’ll get immediate cost savings

The ROI case for implementing a conversational IVR system seems simple. The less engaged your support agents are, the lower your operating costs will be… right?

While this sounds plausible, it is almost never achieved in practice. It takes months to develop a system that is immediately usable before automation can reduce operational costs. A lot of upfront work is required to analyze call drivers, define conversation flows, train natural language models, and then integrate these conversations into backend systems.

As you might imagine, these are very expensive to build, from content licensing fees to development teams tweaking voice recognition and call routing. Without proper design and testing before release, your containment rate will be greatly impacted.

Even after going live, a conversational IVR requires ongoing maintenance to account for changes in call drivers over time. Only through ongoing content enhancement will a conversational IVR system begin to realize its true potential.

Planning for the future of customer support

Conversational IVR systems make it easier for callers to get answers without having to speak to a live agent. However, the technology still has limitations when it comes to handling complex questions, and it takes a while for the system to go live and start routing customer calls.

Generally speaking, a hybrid approach to customer support is best. But if you want to take your customer support from good to great, implementing a conversational IVR system is a solid first step.