How to Interview a Five9 IVA for a Role in Your Digital Workforce

Making it conversational  

To showcase some of the things that FAQ-style IVAs can do, we included some thought-provoking functionality into the new hire IVA, including: 

• Having answers to more than 100 types of questions 

When you develop an FAQ-style IVA, you need to determine what questions are asked most frequently. You can do this by reviewing call recordings, call dispositions and by simply speaking to your agents. For the new hire IVA, we spoke to our sales team to understand which questions are most frequent. We then broke them into categories for things like “benefits”, “features”, “industries,” and “return on investment”. This enabled us to create a series of “intents” in our NLP engine. No, our IVA can’t answer every question. But it can answer many of the most common ones.  

• Friendly prompts & personality 

An IVA that uses natural language processing (NLP), can respond to open-ended questions like “How can I help you?”. This gives the caller a lot of options but can sometimes confuse a caller who might not know what to ask. We addressed this problem by having the IVA offer examples of things the callers can ask (“You can ask me about my qualifications”). Also, after each response, the new hire IVA prompts the caller with coaching questions to keep the conversation going (“I could also tell you how IVAs are built). The caller can always ask for help by saying, “what are my options” or “I need some help” and can hear the information again by saying “can you please repeat that.” And to add some personality, our IVA can also tell a pretty good Dad joke. 

• Using SMS to provide more in-depth information 

Often, callers will want to learn more about a particular topic. However, with a voice user interface, the IVA can only reply with a relatively short, spoken answer. The IVA can send SMS messages with links to datasheets, demonstration videos, whitepapers, and more to provide more in-depth information. The IVA can send an SMS to the phone number that the caller is using, or an alternate number provided by the caller. 

• Persistence  

Callers need time to review the information that’s sent to them via SMS. To give them some extra time we made the IVA persistent – it asks if the caller would like for it to wait while they review the information. The caller can then use a “wake” word to let the IVA know that they’re back and ready to continue the conversation. The IVA suggests, “Just say, ‘I’m back’ when you’re ready to continue.” 

• Failing gracefully 

Just like their human counterparts, IVAs can’t understand everything a caller says. Sometimes the caller will mumble or slur words. On other occasions, the IVA just won’t have an answer to the question. To handle these cases, we designed the IVA to first explain that it didn’t understand but is still learning.  It asks the caller to repeat themselves to see if it transcribed the utterance incorrectly. If the IVA still can’t match the utterance to an intent, it explains that it has noted the question so that it can be trained to respond in the future. Finally, it offers the caller the option to have someone call them back. In a production deployment, your IVA would be likely be designed to offer the caller the option to be connected to a live agent as soon as it can’t answer the question. The live agent would then receive the call and a transcript of the conversation with the IVA. 

• Training & Optimization 

IVAs learn in several ways. First, you define a set of Intents that cover the types of questions your caller is likely to ask; for example “Cost” might be one intent. You then provide the NLP engine with a set of training phrases. These are examples for how a caller might ask the question – for example, “How much do you cost?” You don’t have to provide every question because the NLP’s machine learning engine expands your list, automatically training your IVA. IVAs are also trained using a process called supervised learning. For our new hire IVA, we created a report that logs every time the IVA didn’t have an answer for a question. That way, we can find new commonly asked questions and update the IVA to provide an answer the next time around. Additionally, we added a post-call survey (“Just say ‘survey’”) so that we could collect feedback from callers to tune the IVA continually.