Think Customers: The 1to1 Blog

While IVR isn't going away any time soon, it's time to rethink self-service to address the preferences of Generation Y, aka the Millennial or Net Generation. For these thirty-somethings and younger who sleep with their smartphones and have grown up using the Internet instead of the telephone book to find a phone number, IVR is old school.

Many Gen Y customers aren't inclined to listen to an IVR menu, no matter how well-designed. They want to interact in the style to which they have become accustomed. Companies are going to have to respond with a mix of online, mobile, and social media channels for users to choose as the spirit or device du jour moves them.

IVR will still play a role, but it seems destined to diminish as younger consumers opt to let their fingers do the walking via their digital keyboards. Moreover, cross-media communication will become increasingly important, with users expecting a mash-up among various technologies to get their questions answered quickly and efficiently.

The earliest harbinger of the post-IVR era may have been live chat. With the twin benefit of extending self-service from the handset to the web and of enabling agents to hold more than one conversation at a time, this online assistance strategy will continue to gain traction. But chat-based text messaging alone will soon be insufficient.

Users are going to demand a more holistic experience that allows them to cobrowse web pages with agents while chatting. That's happening today, but only on a limited basis. Borrowing from virtual worlds, we may also see avatars serving as virtual agents in the chat environment to further cross-pollinate the technologies with which younger consumers are familiar.

Click-to-call offers less opportunity for this melding of technologies, but promises to remain an important non-IVR, fact-finding option, especially from mobile phones. Like live chat, this ability to get more information without abandoning a web session expands the boundaries of self-service in a way that fits with today's browsing habits.

The next frontier in this new landscape of customer interaction will undoubtedly be SMS. Users looking at a company website from their iPhone or other mobile device will be able to send a short text message to the contact center by clicking on a link. Agents will be able to respond in kind.

Further down the road may be the ability to use social media like Twitter for one-to-one company/consumer communication. Agents may someday be assigned to Twitter duty just as they are now assigned to phone, email, or chat.

Eventually all these channels will converge. Customers in a chat session, for example, will be able to push a button and turn it into a phone call. Agents will need a seamless blend of multiple technologies to handle a single contact.

But for now, the name of the game is to provide as many options as possible for consumers to get the information they need. This is important not only for IVR-averse users, but for everyone with static or mobile Internet connectivity. The more roads you build to reach your company, the easier for customers and prospects to reach you. And that, after all, is the goal.

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About the Author: Tim Harris is Director of Professional Services for inContact.com.