Any premise based contact center manager KNOWS the challenges associated with managing their own IVR. Having to have a resource in IT do the work for you means that you’re on their timeframe, not your own. This means that what are seemingly simple changes could take weeks or longer.
In a previous contact center job, I made a request to split our billing and ordering queues up. This was to assist in training agents on the multiple systems that were involved in answering those two very different questions. Within the IVR itself was already built an option to select either billing or ordering; however, in the ACD routing, there was no differentiation between the two. This change, to me, seemed to be something that should take a few minutes at most. However, the response I got back was that this modification would take two weeks at minimum. This is obviously completely unacceptable, and yet it’s the reality at many old premise based centers.
One of the first things that truly impressed me at NICE CXone when I started was the Studio application. This tool turns IVR management into what it should be – something accessible to contact center managers, not just IT. Even the most un-tech savvy can, with training, quickly learn to make modifications to their IVR. This means less reliance on IT and more flexibility with your platform. The simple actions within Studio that we’ve created allow you to do extremely complex programming with ease. In the example above, the change I needed made that took IT two weeks would take someone with even rudimentary Studio knowledge two minutes.
One of the things I stress to all my new customers is the importance of getting trained in Studio. I truly feel that to get the most out of our platform, you need to be able to utilize this tool. Learning to use this tool effectively allows you to take the management of your contact center to new levels.
