As regular readers know, IVRs are one of my pet peeves. Not because I want them all to have a button for a human but because I want them to be smart. I want them to use what they know about me to tailor the options, to predict what I am likely to do and use that to make themselves more accessible and to reduce or eliminate the mindless clicking through menus I have to do.
I have yet to see much, if any, of this (IBM’s recent announcement was about analytic matching to agents, not menu control) but the folks at Angel.com have started down this path with a new Business Intelligence reporting solutions. While they focus on helping folks understand who is doing what with their IVR, this is clearly the beginning of a process to analytically drive an IVR system. With the kind of data and analysis that Angel.com is offering you could see the patterns in your IVR and you could being to build the kinds of models that will help you predict the right options to list so folks can get to what they want quickly and easily. A beginning then…
