“You might be able to reduce your use of IVR by 70 – 80%..Simply by driving customers to use the website tablet and smart-phone app to route and queue the call to your contact center agents instead of hanging on till someone is free”. “The increased efficiency of blending voice and graphical contact drives lower cost and improved customer experience.”

Source: Customer Experience Foundation org about “Graphical Contact Routing”

“A brilliant way of dealing with one of the most frustrating service problems that a company has–’kludgy’ audio menus.” “The app recognizes that “contemporary customers are increasingly mobile,” and that “human beings respond more effectively to visual cues than audio ones.”

Source: Paul Greenberg, president of The 56 Group

“IVR self-service is a visual representation of IVR menus, complimented by the rapid growth of smart phones, which allow the caller to navigate the IVR menu 4 to 5 times quicker than using a traditional audio IVR menu.”

Source: Contact Babel “The Inner Circle Guide to Self Service”

“New visual IVR has the potential to introduce more options by using smart mobile devices and computers. By integrating mobile apps along with the features available on smartphones, organizations will now be able to link the interaction with core business processes to gather valuable data and provide other features to engage consumers.”

Source: IVR Resource “Mobile Visual IVR Gives Customers More Control,” March 2014

The advantages of providing visual IVR are numerous. Beyond the obvious ease of navigation, they can also move to chat, schedule a callback and only when necessary, connect an agent. Escalation will be needed less than with traditional IVRs, where it was often the only option available to resolve issues.”

Source: CRM Exchange, Call Center & CRM Best Practices, Sept 2013

“The visual IVR experience is specifically tailored to meet the growing demand of our multiple markets. We will always bring the best solutions to market for our customers that result in optimum end user satisfaction, a commitment to being at the forefront of technology, and most importantly directly impacting customer service performance and call handling time, cost reduction and business processes improvement.”

Source: Gary T. Hannah, Vocantas President and CEO

“Any organization that is providing services to consumer is likely to adopt Visual IVR in order to enable consumers to have more control in doing things themselves: 1- consumers want to get info themselves without having to ask anyone and they want to look at it. 2- Perform transactions ( like transfer of funds) without asking someone to help them 3- be notified when they run into a problem and be able to click to assistance using their on mobile devices, opting for a call back for non-critical issues. This type of flexibility is what any organization providing services can offer its customers by adopting Visual IVR.”

Source: Art Rosenberg, Unified Communications Analyst, Visual IVR- Have We Reached The Future of Customer Service, Roundtable March 2014

“Early adopter of Visual IVR will be companies who have more tech savvy customers. Most likely scenario for initial Visual IVR adoption is when customers are out and about with just their mobile requiring ease of connectivity. Also, a “self-diagnostic” process for healthcare organizations can be a good fit for this Visual-IVR, referring respondents to the right doctor and solution.”

Source: Adrian Swinscoe, Customer Experience Strategist, Visual IVR- Have We Reached The Future of Customer Service, Roundtable March 2014

“Over the past year, contact center integration with mobile customer service applications has gained considerable hype. These solutions include the ability for mobile applications to support capabilities such as visual IVR menus, callback scheduling and transfer with context.”

Gartner, “Hype Cycle for Contact Center Infrastructure, 2013” Drew Kraus

Wireless devices such as smartphones and tablets now support voice, video, browsers and a wide range of applications. This capability is being leveraged by contact centers in two different ways. First, customers are using these devices, so the options and approaches that contact centers use to support these customers are changing. The second way is for internal, back-office use, often for Tier 2 and Tier 3 support personnel who are not at a desk. In both cases, use goes beyond simply utilizing the audio channel, which, while useful, is not new.

Gartner, “Hype Cycle for Contact Center Infrastructure, 2013” Bern Elliot

Mobile support for customer service has jumped in interest during the past year. Healthcare, telecommunications, high-end retail and wealth management service roles have all started adopting iPads and smartphones. It is now the No. 1 area of interest we see, and the explosion in service and support self-service apps reflects that.

Gartner – What’s Hot in CRM Applications in 2013, Ed Thompson

“Visual IVR helps reduce the customer effort in achieving their goals quickly as they can navigate a menu to reach the right agent instead of having to listen to all the options. You want to do this for two reasons: 1) not meeting customer expectations is costly to your business 2) it improves customer satisfaction & loyalty and increases the wallet share over a lifetime of engagement with that customer.”

Source: Kate Legget, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research, Webinar: Omni-Channel – Hype or Reality?

“The wide use of mobile Internet and the rich customer experiences powered by multichannel engagement in the consumer space will prompt customers to seek a mobile customer service application as their first option for support. Gartner estimates that 10% of the Internet users today will opt for mobile customer service applications as their first option. This number will grow rapidly to 60% by 2015.”

Predicts 2014: Customer Support and the Engaged Enterprise”, Gartner, November 2013

“The key to a successful mobile customer service strategy is not to treat the mobile customer service technology in a silo space, but to engineer consistent, differentiated, cross-channel customer experiences, while supporting the need for increased use of customer self-service by using mobile-based, location and context-sensitive technologies.”

Predicts 2014: Customer Support and the Engaged Enterprise”, Gartner, November 2013