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Client Relationship History

Since 2007, Kenway has supported clients with its Contact Center Solutions capabilities, including Interactive Voice Response (IVR) customer experience design, development, call center consulting, and management. An IVR is an automated system that allows customers to interact with a company using voice commands and touch-tone inputs. For example, an IVR can find a caller’s billing information from their account number, authenticate that caller with a password, and collect a payment. If the caller has additional questions or needs further help, the IVR will route the caller to the correct agent.

In 2020, a Fortune 50 telecommunications provider asked Kenway to assist with retiring a legacy IVR experience and platform of a recently purchased company. The project included developing the customer experience on the target IVR software, integrating new application programming interfaces (APIs), and providing the client with overarching project leadership and guidance.

The Problem

The client needed to move several legacy experiences onto its current IVR architecture to sunset the legacy IVR. This platform already contained many different applications, some overlapping with legacy systems. The Kenway call center consulting team needed to identify gaps between the two systems before moving forward with full IVR architecture integration. Additionally, the legacy IVR used data from systems not currently connected to the target IVR solution, requiring the team to onboard new APIs to identify and support callers.

As the client evaluated the impacted areas, it realized the migration had four main obstacles:

1. Data Source Integration: One of the most significant challenges was getting customer data from the legacy systems and integrating that data into the target IVR architecture. The client needed to recognize, support, and route its legacy customers correctly in the existing IVR.
2. Customer Experience Design & Development: Existing applications on the target IVR platform needed to be upgraded to recognize and handle legacy customers and appropriately manage their experience in the IVR. Functions that did not exist on the target platform but were still needed on the legacy side needed to be migrated to avoid loss of functionality and support the business.
3. Routing Rules Design: Routing rules connect the different applications on the IVR platform to the client’s call centers. If these applications are updated, and new data sources are injected, the routing rules must also be updated to integrate the new data.
4. Documentation & Data Mapping: As part of the migration, new APIs were needed to connect legacy back-end systems to the IVR software and the applications. The procedures to build these APIs, the necessary data attributes, mappings, and the business rules were not documented.

The Result

Our call center consulting experts applied IVR best practices to design and build a scalable solution that integrated the legacy customer data and systems into a single IVR software for the client. The team divided the work into two-week sprints using the Agile methodology. Minor releases allowed for regular feedback, and the iteration allowed the team to work multiple workstreams simultaneously.

Kenway’s call center consulting team successfully delivered a fully functional and integrated customer experience, on time and within budget, that matched or exceeded the levels of the legacy IVR architecture. The team integrated all the APIs and systems onto one platform and ensured incoming and outgoing calls were handled correctly. By the end of the year, the client was able to retire the legacy platform, move away from the vendor, and save a few million dollars in expenses.

If you’re ready to take the next step in optimizing your IVR architecture or IVR software, connect with us to discuss how our call center consulting experts can help your company achieve a seamless IVR migration.