The Nine Circles of the IVR Inferno

Oh yeah? Well, Mr. or Ms. Jaded IVR Person, what you haven't heard is that the path to IVR hell is a slippery slope paved with all sorts of well-intended cost savings. It's a path that parallels a deep abyss of customer frustration, lost business, IT department headaches and blamestorming sessions. Wide is the gate and many enter therein; it's the broad highway.

So with all apologies to Dante and Virgil, let's go step by step through the Nine Circles of the IVR Inferno. Now's the time to discover if there should be a sign on your IVR reading, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

• Press The First Circle for… IVR limbo! Here's where you consign callers to endless retries they never get to the end of, forcing them to remain in a No Man's Land where there's no graceful exit for the poor caller and no escalation to a live agent. Please do not abandon all hope for those who enter here. It's easy for a system to tell when too many tries and an excess of random button pressing mean the caller is in trouble and needs real assistance, not the stern "That is an invalid choice!" admonishment for the ninth time. You might as well follow this up with a system message that snaps irritably, "Because I'm IVR, that's why!"

• Press The Second Circle for…the whirlwind of IVR on wireless phones! To interact with an IVR system on a cell phone, it's necessary for callers to move the phone away from their ears to press the numbers, thereby causing callers to miss confirms or non-confirms or other prompts and get hopelessly lost in that dark wood. At the outset, there should be a prompt instructing the caller to "press one" if he or she is on a wireless device so the system can offer longer pauses for button pressing so the caller is not whirled forever into a dark wind of missed cues. Alternatively, a system friendly to wireless callers should use speech recognition, allowing the caller to interact with the system without moving the phone from his or her ear or being forced to use the increasingly tiny wireless keypads to enter 37-digit numbers.

• Press The Third Circle for…gluttonous confirmations! Don't make the poor caller confirm every minute bit of information. Long credit card numbers, okay; Social Security numbers, maybe — but every "yes" and "no" response? Please, let her finish the call.

• Press The Fourth Circle for…miserly IVR systems! Here are the companies that can't be bothered to spend enough money to make their IVR systems usable and effective, so they buy the cheapest, most outdated junk they can find, regardless of whether it suits their needs and their customers' needs. Foolish race of men, how overwhelming their ignorance. Blinded by their greed, they forgot the needs of their customers who actually need real answers sometime before they grow old or stumble onto your competitor's much nicer IVR system…whichever comes first.

• Press The Fifth Circle for…the IVR Rivers Of Forgetfulness. You know the ones. "Press seventeen for…" By the end of the menu choices, the caller has long since forgotten what numbers two and five were but thinks they might have been the right ones, so if he just calls back twice more, he'll have the whole list and can make up his mind. Any more than three choices at once and you're drowning the caller in a Styx of confusion.

• Press the Sixth Circle for…burning the heretical caller at the stake! Down in this circle are developers of IVR systems which, when a caller has made an error, the IVR spits "System Error Number Sixteen" or merely says, "Goodbye!" and terminates the poor sap.

Congratulations…your system has just terminated contact with someone who may have wanted to give you some of his hard-earned cash, but was merely confused by the system. Does an inability to navigate your IVR system somehow render this caller unworthy of your exalted products and services? Give the caller some plain explanation for why the call's being terminated, or better yet, offer an alternative.

• Press the Seventh Circle for… the violence-inducing IVR! Oh, there are many sinners down in this circle. Those who made IVR systems that kept the caller on silent hold with no explanation for a long time, tearing the flesh from his very bones. Those whose IVR systems engendered so much customer frustration the caller never patronized the business again. Fierce centaurs shooting arrows at callers who try to press "0" to escape from the inferno.

• Press the Eighth Circle for… the Malebolges of IVR perfidy, including, but not limited to: incomprehensible messages It's easy for a system to tell when too many tries and an excess of random button pressing mean the caller is in trouble and needs real assistance, not the stern "That is an invalid choice!" admonishment for the ninth time. You might as well follow this up with a system message that snaps irritably, "Because I'm IVR, that's why!"demanding a quick number press the caller is unsure of, forcing a caller to enter a street address via a telephone keypad with older voice response systems, not providing essential information in an easy-to-understand manner, using industry jargon when speaking to callers, systems which fail to collect useful information from a caller before the call is transferred to an agent, users not informed of global commands periodically and not offering human assistance at key points.

• Press the Ninth Circle for… press nine for… press nine for… press nine for… press nine for… press nine for… press nine for… press nine for… press nine for… press nine for… press nine for… press nine for eternity.
By David Sims
TMCnet Contributing Editor