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How to Stop Irritating your Customers with your IVR

By Linda Dobel, TMCnet Contributor

Seasoned contact center management undoubtedly knows that implementing IVR technology can greatly reduce one of its largest expenses—agent head count. Many, however, hold back on using IVR technology because they fear it may diminish positive customer experiences with the company and may, in fact, outright irritate their customers.

IVR vendors are not oblivious to this hesitancy. In fact, Jim Tanner, executive vice president of Product & Strategy at inContact, a leading provider of cloud-based call center solutions and that pairs a software offering with network connectivity, addressed the issue head-on in a recent video blog. 

In the video, Tanner candidly talks about the customer “irritants” IVRs can cause when used improperly and offers five ways contact center management can turn that around to properly use IVR to make IVR one of the “greatest assets you can have in your customer experience portfolio.”

The first of the five most common mistakes Tanners sees people making when developing IVRs is that they forget to define their purpose in using IVR in the first place. In other words, he says they see it as a technology as opposed to a tool they are going to use to enhance the customer experience. For example, are they using it to gather enough information so when a customer reaches an agent the IVR has enhanced the customer experience, or are they using it as a self-service tool that provides enough information that customers may never need to reach an agent.

The second common mistake contact centers make with IVR is they over-complicate the IVR menu. Tanner says, “Keep it simple.” He says an IVR menu should have no more than three items, and those items had better be relevant to what customers are likely to be calling about, say, a power outage or another type of challenge the company is experiencing. Tanner’s advice is to “keep it quick and easy” at every step of the process, “otherwise, they’re going to get irritated and they’re going to opt out to an agent or they’re going to hang up.”

According to Tanner, the third mistake contact center management often makes is they forget that the IVR is the first point of contact with customers, not the agent, and they need to remember that the IVR will be the company’s “brand” to the customer. Consequently, the IVR needs to be designed appropriately to reflect the company’s brand.

The use of IVR for self-service, although a great draw for contact center management, is the fourth area Tanner identifies as a potential irritant to customers if not properly designed. He says that if IVR is used specifically for self-service, contact centers should focus on tasks that are redundant/repetitive, such as pharmacy refills, flight statuses, announcing business hours or provision of driving directions. These tasks are better handled by a machine, Tanner believes, and, in his opinion, customers will be happier talking to a machine than an agent in these situations.

Finally, when designing their IVR, companies too often make the mistake of overlooking the input of their agents. To avoid having an irritating IVR, Tanner suggest that contact center management ask agents a lot—and--often what is working with the IVR and what is not. Agents are more knowledgeable in this area than anyone because they hear the types of questions customers ask after they have interacted with the IVR, and agents get the best reading on the mood of customers after their IVR interaction. They are, he says, “the barometer to how your IVR is operating.”

If contact centers make all of these changes, Tanner is confident they will be providing an IVR experience that improves their brand and their equity with their customers. And the IVR will no longer be an irritant to callers.