Hey, we all like success stories; and IVR solutions provider Angel definitely has one you can learn something from.
The company has worked with some pretty big global pharmaceuticals. And they’ve learned the general corporate culture. “When it comes to many technologies, pharmaceuticals can be slow to change, often times for regulatory or other pressing reasons,” Angel officials said in a blog, adding that this “go it slow” attitude extends to their IVR: “It becomes a major technological and regulatory undertaking to overhaul the IVR systems of a pharmaceutical company.”
A year and a half ago, Angel was selected to assist with an IVR overhaul for “49 brands of one pharmaceutical,” according to company officials, who said that prior to contracting with Angel, this pharma had “significant complexities, such as IVRs connecting to other IVR’s, IVRs connecting to call centers, a jumble of different IVR vendors, drastically different voice talents and IVRs interacting with multiple data sources.”
So you can see the urgency. Needless to say, this wasn’t doing great things for the pharma’s customer satisfaction numbers. As would be expected in such a confused situation, this led to high caller frustration “since the IVRs weren’t talking to each other, nor were they pushing data to the call center representative, who had to ask the caller to repeat information previously provided sometime earlier in the IVR.”
And we’ve never seen hard numbers on this, but we can safely bet that the No. 1 irritant, hands down, for customers using an IVR would be “having to repeat my account number to some yahoo after I’ve entered it in the machine four times.”
So the company used Voice User Interface design, rapid application development, standardized reporting across the enterprise, and application tuning using Business Intelligence analytics to improve lead generation and increase overall customer satisfaction
The pharma itself broke down the ROI thusly: A 50 percent reduction in IVR operational cost, 35 percent increase in lead generation across all applications, 25 percent savings in live agent costs and a 20 percent increase in call containment.
However you look at it, those are impressive numbers.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.Edited by Tammy Wolf