Despite the rise of digital self-service, phone support remains one of the most relied-upon channels in customer experience. When an issue is urgent, complex, or emotional, most customers still pick up the phone. That means the voice channel is not just a legacy touchpoint but is often the moment that determines how a customer feels about your brand.
The problem is that most organizations are still handling those calls with technology that was designed decades ago.
What Customers Think of IVR in 2026
Interactive Voice Response, better known as IVR, was built to manage call volume by routing callers through menu trees. The theory was sound, but the experience has not kept pace with what customers now expect.
According to research published by Talkative, 61% of customers consider IVR a poor experience, and 64% report feeling negatively toward it overall. Nearly half say the menus are too long, and 65% say they do not feel listened to. Most telling of all: 77% of callers say a bad self-service experience is worse than no self-service at all. That last figure is worth pausing on. An IVR that frustrates a caller does not just fail to help. It actively damages the relationship.
The core issue is structural. Traditional IVR was designed around routing, not resolution. It forces callers into predefined paths, cannot understand natural speech, and provides no context to the agent when a transfer eventually happens. The result is a cycle of repeated information, dead ends, and growing frustration.
The Shift Toward Conversational Voice AI
Contact centre leaders and operations teams are increasingly looking at a newer category of technology to replace or augment their legacy voice infrastructure: conversational Voice AI.
Unlike IVR, Voice AI does not present a caller with a menu. It listens. A caller can explain their issue in their own words, and the AI interprets the intent behind that request. It can answer common questions immediately, collect account information, complete self-service tasks like appointment scheduling. When a live agent is required, it routes the caller to the right team and passes along a full call summary, so the caller never has to repeat themselves.
Research from Talkative shows that 64% of customers believe AI will improve the speed and quality of customer experience, 65% want issues resolved faster, and 88% expect quicker response times. The technology and the expectation are converging. Customer expectations and available technology are now closely aligned, which is a key reason adoption is accelerating across industries.
What Voice AI Actually Does
It helps to be specific about capabilities, because “AI for phone support” can mean many things depending on the vendor and the implementation.
A well configured Voice AI solution can:
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- Understand and respond to natural language across dozens of languages and accents
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- Integrate with your CRM to pull up customer records in real time
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- Handle routine self-service tasks without human intervention
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- Collect and pass context to a live agent on transfer
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- Transcribe and summarize every call for compliance and quality review
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- Generate insights that reveal patterns in customer enquiries over time
Talkative, one of Sunco’s technology partners, offers a Voice AI platform that includes all of these capabilities. It integrates into existing SIP-based telephony environments or can operate as a standalone solution, meaning organizations do not need to rip out their current infrastructure to get started. The platform also includes a Voice AI Copilot feature, which provides live response suggestions and knowledge base access to agents during calls, so AI continues to support the conversation even after a transfer to a human.
Every call is fully transcribed and recorded, giving supervisors complete visibility for auditing, trend analysis, and compliance purposes. The platform can also analyze thousands of calls using AI to surface common topics, flag high-effort interactions, and generate actionable reports, eliminating hours of manual review.
Implementation Does Not Have to Mean Disruption
One of the most common concerns from operations and IT leaders is that upgrading voice infrastructure is a lengthy and expensive undertaking. In practice, modern Voice AI does not require that kind of commitment upfront.
Many organizations start with a single, high-volume call journey like appointment booking, billing enquiries, or account verification and prove value in that contained environment before expanding. Talkative’s platform is built to support this kind of phased approach, with a simple administrative interface for building and adjusting call flows and an infrastructure that supports 99.99% uptime with automatic fallback options.
From a cost standpoint, the model is structured around per-minute pricing with no extensive setup fees, which makes it accessible for organizations at different stages of digital maturity. Data sovereignty is also addressed directly: the platform is compliant with global privacy standards and ensures that data remains where it is required to.
The Business Case Beyond CX
The impact of upgrading voice support extends beyond customer satisfaction scores, though those do improve. When AI handles routine calls, live agents are freed to focus on the interactions that actually require human judgment. Average handle times decrease and unnecessary transfers are reduced. Agents start conversations with context already in hand, rather than spending the first two minutes re-gathering information the caller already provided.
For supervisors and contact centre leaders, the benefit is also operational. Real-time sentiment tracking, live dashboards, and AI-generated call summaries replace manual spot-checking and provide a fuller picture of what is happening across the queue at any given moment.
Where to Start
If your organization is evaluating how to improve phone-based customer support, a few questions are worth working through before looking at any specific solution.
Start by identifying where your current voice journey creates the most friction. Look at abandonment rates, call transfer data, and any post-call survey feedback that specifically references the automated experience. Those data points will tell you where the highest-impact starting point is.
From there, consider what a successful outcome looks like in your environment, whether it is faster resolution, lower cost-to-serve, improved first-contact resolution, or some combination. Those objectives should drive the configuration and measurement of any Voice AI implementation, not the other way around.
Talk to Sunco
Sunco has helped organizations across Canada evaluate and implement communication technologies that improve both the customer experience and the efficiency of internal teams. If you are exploring what a transition away from legacy IVR might look like for your business, we can walk you through what the technology does, how it integrates with your existing environment, and what a phased rollout might look like in practice.
Reach out to the Sunco team to arrange a consultation or demonstration.
