Exploring IVR, chatbots, and voice assistants

Providing more channels for customer interaction is often a very smart investment. It means reaching more people, having a high customer satisfaction rate, and a reduced need for manual interaction (such as assistance provided by a human operator), which can be expensive and also less effective. These goals are important to achieve, and in this section, we'll look at some ways to do so.

Interactive voice response

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is one kind of technology that helps us achieve the aforementioned goals. It provides a way for a human user to interact with services over a phone call. I think that pretty much every one of us has first-hand experience of interacting with an IVR system, as they are pretty common in helpdesk hotlines. The system offers a number of options to choose from. The user can then choose one of the options using a Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency (DTMF) tone (a tone generated by pressing a button on...