Interactive voice response (IVR) systems act kind of like an Internet browser for voice—they connect callers to information in organizations’ databases.
However, IVR systems only operate through audio. They don’t provide a visual for interactions with callers, yet. That’s not a knock on IVR systems—they don’t provide touch, taste or smell either, and no one expects them to.
If researchers at the IBM Almaden Research Center had their way, though, IVR systems would. Well, they’d provide visual as well as audio, anyway.
Researchers Min Yin and Shumin Zhai conducted a series of experiments “examining the benefits of augmenting telephone voice menus with coordinated visual displays and keyword search.”
Yin and Zhai began their research to address what they call “touchtone hell,” which they describe as “the difficulty and frustration with automatic interactive voice response (IVR)-based phone call routing.”
We hear ya. Poorly designed IVR systems are the bane of everyone’s existence at least once in their lives. By poorly designed, I mean IVR systems whose call flow hinders rather than helps callers. (Which is why it’s so important for organizations to design their call flows thoughtfully, with the caller in mind.)
In their report (The Benefits of Augmenting Telephone Voice Menu Navigation with Visual Browsing and Search), Yin and Zhai suggest incorporating visuals on the screens of cell phones to help callers.
The researchers found that by visually displaying a “menu tree” on a caller’s phone, an IVR system could not only make the selection process easier (seeing is usually easier than hearing) but faster (selections display instantly all at once so users don’t have to wait for the system to read them off).
In their report, Yin and Zhai concluded that users would be “much more satisfied with and even enthusiastic” about such a system. They would also save time and encounter fewer errors (the more complex the navigation, the more helpful in reducing errors).
