Workforce Management Featured Article
Does Your IVR Help or Hinder Your Business?
Interactive voice response, or IVR, has a reputation among customers, and it’s not a good one. The IVR is frequently the butt of jokes and often the topic of rants. It’s the cause of raised blood pressure all over the developed world. It has been with us since the 1970s, but it’s one of those technologies that just can’t seem to get a break.
This isn’t the fault of customers. It’s not even the fault of the IVR.
The IVR is simply a tool, and like any tool, it can be used for good or for ill. Few people would argue that it has the potential to make callers’ lives easier. It connects them to the right department. It allows them to choose their preferred language. It can let them know how long the wait for a live agent is. It can help agents be ready for them when they finally pick up the call by identifying the customer and pulling up records. It can even give callers information they need during times when the call center is closed.
Unfortunately, too many companies don’t see the IVR as a tool for helping customers. They use it as a shield to keep customers away from them, creating such poor designs that the tool becomes ineffective. These companies use their IVRs to put customers into endless loops, forcing them through four, five, six or more levels of menu tree. They don’t offer menu choices that customers need. They put them through to departments where no one is available to take their call. They require customers to enter too many digits for their account numbers, and then – the crowning insult – they send them to an agent who asks them to repeat their account number.
In the days when all IVRS were boxes sitting in the IT room, designing call routing menus used to be a feat of technological accomplishment. It was difficult and cumbersome, and most companies didn’t change the menus very often. For this reason, it was extra critical to get it right. Smart companies got it right by actually listening to their IVR, putting it through the paces and finding the frustration points before the menus were inflicted on callers. It was the single most effective way to determine whether the IVR was helping or hurting a company, according to a recent blog post by Monet Software’s Chuck Ciarlo.
“Analyzing calls and listening in to IVR interactions will provide the insight you need to make this determination,” wrote Ciarlo. “So it’s important to start your call monitoring and quality assurance at the IVR, not when the agent takes the call.”
To attain IVR design perfection, there are some tips companies should follow:
- Customers should never have to button-push or speak their way through more than three of four menu choices. If you force them to, they will zero out to an agent and eliminate the benefits of the IVR.
- If you use speech recognition for call routing with your IVR, ensure it’s effective. Nothing frustrates customers faster than a speech solution that won’t recognize their voices.
- While the front of the IVR may seem like a great place to promote your company (“Welcome to Acme Corporation, home of the world’s most sophisticated and popular widget”), keep it short. Customers aren’t there to hear about how great you are. They want to get down to business and not waste valuable time.
- If you route a call to a department through your IVR, ensure someone is actually there to pick up the phone. In these days of unified communications, there’s no excuse for customers to get voice mail when they call during business hours.
- If you ask customers to enter account numbers through the IVR, ensure the agent is making use of this information when he or she picks up the call. Nothing irritates customers more than having to repeat information. Use that account number to greet the customer by name or indicate that you know who it is that’s calling and what that customer’s status is.
As the IVR increasingly becomes an application sitting on a desktop instead of a hard-to-administer box in an IT office, the excuses to not maintain the technology properly are disappearing. Cloud-based IVR solutions are easy to configure and change, and a breeze to test to ensure that customers aren’t being frustrated.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi