What is the future of the IVR?

While techniques in IVR development continue to evolve, I really don't see major technical advances coming out any time soon. Instead, I see that there will be continued focus on social media channels.

However, I do see the continued evolution of the IVR (along with the ACD) towards a cloud model. As VoIP, particularly SIP, gains more traction in the marketplace, the movement of the IVR (and the ACD) to the cloud should continue to gain traction. While cloud IVRs have been available for over 10 years, the ability to join critical IVR data with a ACD routing decisioning on a cloud level is still evolving. I predict that this will be a key technology trend through the next 5 years. While large companies may decide to continue to use a premise based solution for accounting reasons, the possibilities of the cloud to enabling an on-demand and flexible workforce are very exciting and are a trend to watch closely.

From a business standpoint, it is my hope that as companies recover from the recession, an increased emphasis will be placed on the value of utilizing data generated by the IVR, the agent, the web, etc. into a full holistic view of the customer experience that empowers an organization to drive internal and external process improvements and agent development. Data is amazing stuff...but is only valuable if you DO something with the data. Doing something includes tailoring your IVR, chat, web, and other channels to dynamically respond to customer needs and external factors...and making sure that all of your channels are consistent, dynamic, and meaningful to the customer - not a tollgate, but a information source and expressway to the resolution of the reason for contact.