The interactive voice response (IVR) technology enables callers to use self-service inquiries or provide insight into the reason they are calling the agent. However, the lack of IVR adoption among callers and their initial biases increase government organizations’ demand for agents.

Deloitte Consulting, LLP partnered with fourteen SCADpro students looking at how to boost user adoption of IVR by those contacting government agencies, explored what was behind people’s negative attitudes toward IVR, and how to overcome them. Using a combination of surveys, interviews, and live experiments, we identified and examined users’ specific assumptions about agent-assisted solutions being invariably superior to technology-delivered solutions, and how to reverse those assumptions and steer users toward trusting IVR systems.