David Facer, senior product manager at inContact, a cloud-based vendor of contact center products, has offered a few tips for avoiding some of the most common problems, screwups and snafus associated with implementing IVR.
He’s all for IVR: “Not only can you improve the quality of your customer interactions but also lower overhead by reducing the number of calls received by your agents as well as reducing agent burnout that often occurs when handling menial calls.”
Create an IVR road map that prioritizes your targets, he advises: “typically whatever is causing your contact center the most pain, or the simplest project that will produce results -- and proceed one step at a time.”
For example, Facer says, one Internet service provider “had big plans for IVR,” but started by implementing a simple IVR process informing customers when there was an outage in their zip code. “It was the simplest item on their IVR implementation list, yet one that solved a major customer headache while saving hundreds of agent hours.”
Don’t expect IVR to solve every issue. “Some things are just too complex and unwieldy to implement economically and effectively.” One inbound sales contact center tried to put their product inventory in their IVR system, only to discover that the number of products and required IVR choices was frustrating to callers.
Offer IVR for simple customer interactions such as bill pay, account balance, order status, or inquiring about the time of a service call. Customers expect a self-service option for these kinds of processes.
Make sure that your IVR process folds into your current processes – “you don’t want to have an IVR project that creates additional overhead on the back-end.
Don’t try to re-invent your processes at the same time as implementing your IVR system, he advises, you’ll overwhelm yourself and your resources. And don’t think you have to walk the self-service IVR path alone – “Most IVR companies will offer their professional services team to ensure you don’t get caught in any of these traps.”
Finally, Facer advises, “consider using hosted and SaaS (News - Alert) ACD and IVR providers. With a measured, incremental approach, it’s a competitive advantage to add this functionality without the capital expense and IT commitment of a traditional hardware approach.”
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 Kelly McGuire