Transforming customer service through Visual IVR

We're helping O2 to improve and join up the self-service experience for their customers through an  award-winning Visual IVR service.

Issue

Capita and O2 have worked together since 1992 and, over that time, have collaborated closely to overcome the challenges of rising customer expectations and disruptive technologies. O2 wanted to further improve and join up the self-service experience for customers, so they could move from voice to digital and reduce the time needed on the phone.

Insight

When moving from voice to digital, customers want a simple, seamless solution.

Our approach

Developing and implementing Visual IVR was a complex project, involving Telefónica UK (the company behind O2), Capita and third-party suppliers. The inevitable snagging and ‘unknown unknowns’ were successfully overcome thanks to the open, close nature of our partnership. It took just seven months to agree, design and launch the new technology, despite there being no reference sites available in the market.

When a customer calls, and has provided their account password, the voice recognition service looks to match the reason for calling to one of the self-service features available in the web based version of MyO2. If a match is found, the customer will be told that they are being sent a secure SMS link to the relevant information in MyO2. If the customer opts to click on the link, the Visual IVR logs them into MyO2 directly. The call is left open and if the customer decides they need help from an agent to complete their journey they can click on a button on their MyO2 screen. 

The impact

This brand-new system delivers customer satisfaction equal to that of a voice call. Through Visual IVR customers can complete eight transactions, including unlatching their phone, paying a bill and changing address, three minutes faster than going through the standard contact centre process.

In addition we’ve found that:

• 99% of customers don’t need to follow up with a voice call
• there is an average time reduction of 100 seconds against completing the same transaction via Voice IVR and payment processing reduced to just 34 seconds
• there is 15% greater containment in Visual IVR than in traditional Voice IVR transactions.