Customers contact an enterprise to accomplish something – change a reservation, get order status, pay a bill, etc.  Although every caller is unique, most of their goals can be grouped into well-defined categories.  The term for these categories is “intent.”  Caller intent has always been the first thing a contact center tries to determine: when an agent answers a call, they typically ask, “How can I help you?” 

In the early days of IVR, the number of intents an application could support was limited to presses on the keypad.  The advent of automatic speech recognition (ASR) made the caller’s experience more natural and pleasant, but didn’t substantially change the number of intents that could be handled. 

Today, AI promises a quantum leap in customer contact handling.  Vastly improved speech recognition coupled with natural language understanding allows customers to voice their intents in a much more diverse manner. Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) can even continually learn additional ways to express those intents, allowing callers more flexibility than ever. 

Despite these advances, the most important element of IVA design remains the same—to identify and anticipate WHY the customer is calling.  When we begin working with a client on requirements for a new IVA, the first step is always to get to the heart of caller intent.  Existing IVR options may provide some insight into caller purpose, but we aim to dig deeper.  What are agents hearing from customers?  Where in the current IVR are callers failing?  Have you introduced new products or services that will generate new intents? And, what are the tasks that were formerly too “complex” to handle in an IVR, but are now made possible by Conversational AI?

By answering these questions, and deriving a comprehensive list of intents, you will have taken the first step toward getting the “conversation” started.  Armed with this information, INI user interface designers can begin drilling down into each intent, identifying a set of data entities for each, scoping any required API integrations, and architecting a conversational flow that will greatly improve the human experience—for both callers and agents.

Ready to take the next step?  INI can help you get from here to there on your self-service roadmap.  Contact us to learn more.