Interactive Voice Response

This section of our technical library presents information and documentation relating to IVR and interactive voice response software as well as automatic call answering solutions. Business phone systems and toll free answering systems (generally 800 numbers and their equivalent) are very popular for service and sales organizations, allowing customers and prospects to call your organization anywhere in the country. Our PACER and Wizard IVR systems add another dimension to our call center phone system solutions. An Interactive Voice Response (IVR) processes inbound phone calls, plays recorded messages including information extracted from databases and the internet, and potentially routes calls to either in-house service agents or transfers the caller to an outside extension.

By Kris Brittain, Raymond Paquet, and Steven J. Cain

Enterprises are experiencing a technical support crisis with increased demand for support and corporate desire to reduce support budget expenditures. Self-support technologies and new service processes alter the delivery model from one-to-one (agent-to-employee) to one-to-many (automated-solution-to-employees). The primary value of enhancing the consolidated service desk (CSD) with self-service capabilities is to provide proactive, more-automated, and better-quality service at increasingly lower costs. However, to do so requires a deep understanding of where success lies by aligning tools, processes, and problem types to improve overall productivity.

What is automated self-service?

Automated support or self-service began with tools such as interactive voice response (IVR), which has had an impact on results in recent years. The delivery of this technology offered early capabilities in areas such as call routing, password reset, and outage alert information delivery. In the mid-1990s, CSD organizations added Web-based access to frequently asked questions and e-mail problem submissions as a mechanism to aid in call/problem handling. Since 1999, the current generation of self-service technologies leverage new resolution tools deployed as Web-based or end-user-resident solutions.

Does self-service affect performance?

In the course of IT service desk studies since 1999, Gartner has observed distinct trends associated with the type of support automation tools deployed and CSD productivity. In Figure 1, the top line describes "calls handled per agent," which is the number of calls handled by human agents on average per month from 1999 through 2001. There has been a slow but steady decline in calls during this period. At the same time, the average talk time for agent-handled calls has increased. By contrast, the "calls handled per total help desk full-time equivalents (FTEs)," which represents all of the employees in the IT service desk organization, have increased. This number is derived from the total calls—automated (via IVR and self-service) and handled by human agents—each month divided into the total help desk staff, including agents, managers, trainers, and self-help support staff. It is important to point out that "calls" are e-mail and telephone calls, with voice calls representing more than 95 percent of the total volume. IT service desk productivity is growing as agent resources are leveraged in more complex problem-solving activities.

Figure 1

Does problem categorization play to productivity?

Prior to support automation, tier 1 analysts would handle all the calls offered to the help desk. This meant that they would answer some difficult/time-consuming questions and some easy/quickly-handled questions. To automate the support model, the CSD needs to have an understanding of the problem type and categorization. The more granular the understanding of problem typing, the better the possibility of success in support automation. As the percentage of automated calls increases (predominantly through the use of IVR as Web self-help), the call types being handled by tier 1 agents evolve. With automation in place, the agents are left with the more difficult questions, and the corresponding average talk time per agent-handled contact has increased. With this increase in talk time, the number of calls handled per agent has decreased consistently since 1999.

Will this productivity continue?

Bottom Line

IVR and self-service additions to the support model increase the overall productivity of the support organization beyond the service desk agents. On average, this functionality enables the support staff to increase the number of calls managed with the same staffing. Enterprises should invest in automation technology to improve the efficiency of the overall support staff, while accepting a "perceived" decrease in productivity from the service desk agents. However, this perception is false because help desk agents are now addressing more complex and time-consuming problems.

Gartner originally published this article on Jan. 14, 2002.

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