In my entry titled “Adapting To Caller Skills Increases Success By 1 Percent” http://www.customerthink.com/blog/adapting_to_caller_skills_increases_success_by_1_percent, I wrote on how a client is achieving these results using adaptive technology for the IVR. Today I’d like to quantify the economic benefits associated with the technology.
Though it varies by geographic region and length of call, agent handled call costs can run about $2.10 per call versus roughly 18 cents per call for the IVR. Doing the math for a premise based call center handling 5M calls per month and converting 1 percent of these calls from “satisfied by an Agent” to “satisfied in the IVR” translates to $1.92 X 1% X 5M = $96,000 per month or $1,152,000/year.
If on the other hand you are in the business of operating an IVR hosting center handling say 1.5 billion calls/year and billing at 35 cents per successful call (transaction based model), the direct savings come out to 1.5BN x 1% x $.35 = $5.25M/year.
Note these savings account for the improvements in call success rates only.
Adaptive technology performance can be configured to meet specific business goals – optimization parameters allow for improvements in IVR Containment(AHR), IVR Utilization, Caller Input Error Rates, IVR Handle Time (AHT) and Call Success Rates.
In addition, there are the harder-to-quantify business benefits of providing a better Customer Experience for your callers. This benefit encourages repeat use of the IVR for returning callers and allows the enterprise to build a better relationship with its customers over time.
To learn more about the economic and customer experience benefits of adaptive technology, visit the Production Data News page at http://bit.ly/HSyNT7
For further information on how to put adaptive technology to use at your call center or hosted environment, contact Daniel O’Sullivan at [email protected]
