Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) are the front door of your contact center — handling routine inquiries, authenticating callers, collecting information, and resolving interactions without agent involvement. Modern IVA platforms use conversational AI to create natural, intent-driven experiences that customers actually prefer to waiting on hold.
Legacy touchtone IVR menus frustrate customers and drive them to agents for interactions that should be self-service. Conversational IVA platforms from Nuance, Google CCAI, Amazon Connect, and the native AI engines in Genesys and NICE can understand natural language, access back-end systems in real time, and complete complex transactions autonomously. RLM advises on the IVR/IVA architecture that maximizes self-service resolution without sacrificing the customer experience.
A structured advisory process — from discovery and market evaluation to vendor selection and post-deployment optimization — tailored to your specific environment and objectives.
We analyze your current IVR — documenting menu trees, containment rates by call type, transfer paths, and the customer experience gaps that push callers to agents unnecessarily.
We evaluate IVA platforms — Nuance Dragon, Google CCAI, Amazon Lex, Genesys Dialog Engine, NICE Enlighten — against your call type distribution, backend integration requirements, and the self-service completion rates you need to justify the investment.
We design the conversational flows, intent taxonomy, and entity extraction models that enable your IVA to understand customer requests accurately — including fallback handling for low-confidence intent matches.
We evaluate and design the authentication approach for your IVA — from knowledge-based authentication to voice biometrics — balancing security requirements against the friction that drives abandonment.
These are the dimensions that consistently separate successful CX deployments from costly ones — and the questions RLM will help you answer before any commitment.
Vendors often cite high containment rates achieved in ideal conditions. Evaluate containment performance across your specific call type distribution — including complex and emotional call types where AI containment typically drops.
IVA self-service value depends entirely on real-time access to your systems of record. Evaluate API connectivity to your CRM, billing platform, order management, and the data refresh rates that affect information accuracy.
NLU accuracy varies significantly by domain vocabulary, accent diversity, and background noise conditions. Evaluate recognition accuracy in conditions representative of your caller demographics.
Poor escalation handling — forcing callers to repeat information already provided to the IVA — is the most common IVA failure mode. Evaluate context transfer quality when the IVA escalates to a live agent.
If your customer base includes non-English speakers, evaluate language support depth beyond simple translation — including dialect recognition, culturally appropriate conversation design, and agent escalation in the same language.
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Talk to an RLM advisor who specializes in CX technology. We'll help you find the right solution for your business — without vendor bias.