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The Problem with IVRs

Posted by: Guy Elliott @ 3/02/2010 1:30:54 PM

I recently explained to a relatively new acquaintance that I worked in the customer service arena, specialising in speech recognition and biometric verification.

I then had to listen through a 15 minute diatribe about how my friend was happy to pay more for a service provider who didn’t make her navigate through seemingly endless IVR menus, when all she really wanted was to speak to someone who could help her with her query.

My initial reaction was of annoyance; don’t people realise that IVRs are intended to serve callers so they can get to someone who will best help them quickly? Well, obviously not. As she continued to speak, the hypocrisy of this justification of some IVRs became apparent.

From a business perspective, we understand why there is the need to ‘categorise’ callers to ensure they do get to a person who can best help them with their query. Too often we overlook the fact that callers do not want to, or are not able to, analyse their query for themselves. Hence, why they are calling us in the first place!

Yet this simple fact should highlight to us, the problem with most IVR menus; we are asking the customer to analyse their query for us, to determine some things about the nature of their query so that they can actually answer the IVR menu questions we ask callers. No wonder they get frustrated!

So, IVRs are great for self-service where callers are expecting such a service (and in fact expect such service in many cases now). However, for general enquiries IVRs can clearly be seen as a barrier to customers.

Introducing high quality, speech recognition driven menus to callers can alleviate this dilemma; however they clearly need to avoid simply introducing the same problem in another format. If we strive to actually ‘improve’ the callers’ experience and therefore minimise their frustration, we can engender greater trust of this technology, resulting in significant benefits for all; better customer experience and outcomes for callers along with greater efficiency to the business.

Comments

Posted by: Walt Tetschner @ 6/02/2010 10:08:09 AM Guy, Nice post! In many instances we appear to be attempting to automate functions that really are not appropriate to automate. The value of IVR is in the automation of repetitive, routine calls. I also believe that a huge part of the caller frustration comes from a realization that the caller is wasting their time with the IVR. The caller is asked to provide information that is then not used. You are routed to a pool of agents that handle all of the calls. If you have provided information that the agent could use, it is wasted because the CTI is not functional. The routing menu appears to exist just in case they ever decide to have specialized agents. The agents are invariably not disciplined to utilize the CTI functionality that is in place.

Posted by: Steve Lewis @ 18/02/2010 9:29:07 AM Agree. I've just come back from the UK where I've spent significant time onsite with two of our major clients. When the agents use the provided CTI information callers are pleasantly surprised and it makes for a much improved interaction. For the scenarios where we fail to recognise key information such as an identifying number, the ability to "whisper" the spoken number to the agent can go a great way to fixing up issues with callers having to repeat themselves. To be successful the caller has to see that the IVR is there to help them get their enquiry resolved. In too many organisations it ends up being a barrier. At Salmat we have always been proponents of extracting all meaningful information from a caller response and combining it with other sources of information (account status, etc) to route them as quickly as possible to somebody who can help.

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