Brent

Only the truely enlightend would even begin to contemplate this path...

The greatest shame of all is that it is THE path to success - both personal and business.

David

Some random thoughts inspired by the posts up to now.

Until IVR is indistinguishable from speaking to a real person, it is never going to be as accepted as doing just that. However, 1/ it's getting close, 2/ it's a lot cheaper (orders of magnitude), 3/ well thought out and designed systems give good results.

As a consultant in the automation market, I've seen a number of good IVR implementations - but far more bad ones. I can't understand why the IVR vendors allow poor implementations out of the door - they damage the industry, the perception of the client, the perception of IVR in general and the vendor's reputation. Every failed IVR call is a nail in the coffin for the called party's business plan.

Interesting that IVR is being interpreted in terms of speech recognition rather than DTMF input - in my experience the two are often used interchangeably - anyone got any thoughts on this?

Decreasing the size of your call centre/making yourself redundant. Nice idea, but most call centres I have dealt with are growing too fast - slowing the growth is the main target. Reversing it would be great, but the clients are trying not to be too optimistic.... plus the call centre vendors don't like this idea at all!

Automation, in all its forms (and I'm including natural language automation of e-mail responses, web chat and so on here) is a useful tool in the provision of certain services which would be uneconomical to provide otherwise.

The idea of changing people's behaviour through root cause analysis is great, but are you really going to be able to do this? In some cases, where significant amounts of information can be gathered about the callers, perhaps. But I suspect it is not practical in many cases, and will vary from caller to caller.

Anyone got any thoughts to add?

Cheers,

Duncan

I think the company has to look at the business scenario before implementing i.e what is the average talk time, volume of call expected. By considering these two factor one can program the application.

If the customer don't like to listen the voice Message, he won't like to listen the engage tone too. Keep your IVR ports x% above the number of lines. X percent will be actually decide the number of customers you want to keep on hold when all lines are busy.

Based on the average talk time, calculate the hold time for a customer and play it back i.e the time has has wait to connect to CSR. Customer is prepared to wait till such time, if he opts to.

I agree to the point is that the IVR options hierarchy should not be long, as it really fustrate the customer.

When the customer is in hold provide him with some useful information based on the option he selected for ex if he selected bill related complaint. provide info related to that. I think it interests him. I info should not be more than 30 sec.

To make it more effective IVR should be integrated with CRM. Which will decide the priority of the call and route to the CSR Immd. IVR will guide the CSR as well as customer to the specific area of problem or info. which will help the CSR to directly address that issue/query.

The information captured is again based on the business process. It is always advisable that data/information caputre to be done by an CSR expect the Identification.

I did read a survey recently published by Which which stated the ten most annoying experiences with Call Centres today -

Being kept on hold
Being transferred between different CSRs
Not able to get through to the right CSR
Irritating Music On Hold
Rude staff
Having to use DTMF tones rather than speaking to route through an IVR
Lack of staff knowledge
CSR not being able to answer your query
Being cut off
No estimated hold time

A lot of these you could justify using IVR but i find the biggest complaint from customers using IVR is when they have keyed in information not received the info they need and they transfer to an agent and then get asked for all the information again so CTI is really important when designing an application

I personally hate the IVR that 'check security' and route you, only to be put through to an agent who has to 'ask a security question' again. Banks are very fond of doing this. Show me an IVR that avoids duplication and I'll show you some potentially happy customers.


They compund the issue by ringing you on outbound and then ask you to confirm your security details ie. confirm who you are, before selling to you.

There is a relatively cheap way of solving the connection issue between an IVR and the Call Centre - We have used a product called CT Connect which basically takes an output from the IVR and inputs into the agents desktop application enabling a screen pop with all your information. An unlimited agent license is approx 12K and application on top maybe 15K

Thanks for the suggestion Darren I'm familiar with IVR screen popping however I believe the duplication arises from the restrictions of the Financial Services Act security implications and not technological deficiencies.

One of the issues facing financial companies when asking for identification is that potential fraudsters, and these can be family members will have access to or can guess passcodes that are used in the IVRs.

Whilst the IVR can make rudimentary checks asking standard questions, more complex idenfication processes which involve random questioning cannot be easily translated.

However, if they are asking the same question as the IVR puts to the caller then it is just a straight duplication, you would think that the screen pop or routing would be intelligent enough to indicate if the caller had passed the checks else what is the point of asking it in the first place.

I only wish I had a pound for everytime a caller had said, "A human being! That woman on the answer thingy couldn't understand me...blah blah" Thankfully, more often than not, they're grateful to finally be speaking to a real person and not frustrated.
The technology/software merits etc don't concern me, customer satisfaction does and in my enviroment IVR doesn't appear to be a benefit. In my line of work regional dialects differ greatly and constant updates to the post office address system contribute more to the failings of IVR rather than the software itself.

"The technology/software merits etc don't concern me, customer satisfaction does "

If you will forgive me Julie, but from the horses mouth... hear hear.

In more years that I care to remember, I have yet to hear of/experience a single solitary case of IVR implementation solely, and genuinely, just for customers benefit... The bean counters (lovely warm human beings that they are) rule...

David

But think back to issues like ...

- you had so many different numbers listed, I didn't know which one to call.

- I never get through to the person I need to speak to, I always have to explain twice, once to the person who answers, and then again when I am transfered

- I've rung and rung all morning, but kept getting the engaged tone.

It seems to me that there were always issues, we just have (slightly!) different ones now.

You can't please all of the people all of the time.

In more years that I care to remember, I have yet to hear of/experience a single solitary case of IVR implementation solely, and genuinely, just for customers benefit

Err.

Me Sir, me sir..

Our IVR was redesigned to have 2 options only.

"Press one to make a claim, Press two or hold for anything else."

That way we've got a 90%+ Service in under 16 sec.

Feel quite proud of that.

DaveA