Call Center Management Featured Article
Stop Using Your IVR to Drive Your Customers Away
Let’s face it: interactive voice response (IVR) technology has never been anyone’s favorite. Calling a company only to be greeted with a robotic voice that expects you to route your own calls is such a familiar pain point to many Americans that it’s the subject of comedians’ rants. It’s not an unfair bias, either…the simple truth is that many IVRs are designed in a way to be as unpleasant to customers as possible.
What an IVR ought to be is a quick and easy way to connect callers to the best possible agents. What most companies seem to use it as is a barrier to try and prevent customers from ever getting through to a live agent. (Who hasn’t listened to the recorded voice begging the customer to “go to our Web site”?) Most companies seem to design IVR menu trees from their own perspective to railroad customers into a configuration convenient for the contact center. Want customers to stop hating IVR? Design them with the customer in mind, not the company.
In a recent blog post, Monet Software (News - Alert) CEO Chuck Ciarlo noted that it’s worthwhile to take the time to periodically review your IVR, and determine whether it is helping or hindering customer relations. It’s not the kind of thing you can “set and forget.” Some important points you should be checking include:
Speed of use. It’s not an opportunity to tell people all about your new product line. It’s for routing customer calls.
“The faster the IVR gets customers the answer they seek, or to an agent, the less intrusive it will appear,” wrote Ciarlo. “Long marketing messages incorporated into caller options are usually perceived as annoying, not informative.”
Don’t offer 9 menu choices. If customers have to wait 10 minutes to finally hear the option they need, they’ll never use your IVR and will instead begin zeroing out quickly. Determine the most common reasons customers call, and include no more than four or five menu options in the top men.
Always provide a path to a live agent. We get it. You want to use the IVR to make sure customers don’t call. It’s tempting. But if you do, chances are good that customers won’t call…ever again. Or log onto your Web site, or enter your retail store, or make a purchase. These are customers, not city inspectors. You want them to come back. An IVR should work in conjunction with live agents, not in place of them .
Analytics. Today’s IVR technology can help you understand your customers better. Some have the ability to “learn” from customers and get smarter each time that customer calls by understanding language preferences, common menu choices and even the speed at which the customer interacts with the IVR (slowing down or speeding up as needed). Tying the IVR to speech analytics can give your company valuable insight into the reasons why customers call, and help you make their experience better each time they interact with you.
IVR, like most contact center technologies, is a necessary tool. It should be a tool that helps you give your customers a better experience…not one that drives them away.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi