The ‘I’ in IVR should mean “intelligent”

This blog post is sponsored by the Zero Distance Community and T-Systems.

The acronym IVR stands for interactive voice response, sometimes also referred to as VRU (voice response unit). Basically a box (on-premise or in the cloud) that some say is just a glorified robotic auto-attendant. Despite the “interactive” namesake, most customers despise interacting with an IVR.

I believe it has a lot to do with the evolution of computing paradigms. The IVR is like any other computer after all — efficient, programmable, and interactive. And likewise, we have similar frustrations dealing with IVRs as we do computers.

Earlier this year I wondered about crowdsourcing an IVR app. Today we need to redefine IVR as an intelligent voice response…