Towards a Conversational Agent for Contact Centres

The usability of touch-tone Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems is dismal. Clients would rather speak to a contact centre agent than navigate through the menu structure found in these systems. Contact centres, however, due to various reasons, such as high personnel costs, tend to use IVR as their solution for automation. This paper compares a rule based system, which is designed to resemble an IVR system, against a natural language interface which uses text as input. The evaluation is conducted to determine whether natural language interfaces provide a more effective automation technique in comparison to current techniques employed by contact centres.