Adaptive IVR Blog

Never underestimate the power of recurring cost savings.  Even tiny improvements to contact center operations may seem deceptively small, but will save you big in the long run.

For example, our continuous improvement practice recently recommended a change to a client’s IVR system that will result in an automation rate increase of a fraction of one percent.  The higher automation rate will save the client about $4000 a month by reducing transfers to agents.  On the scale of operating a large contact center, $4000 in savings sounds like a drop in the bucket.

Most enterprises treat their Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system like a family car.  When you bring it home for the first time, it feels like it’s perfect.  It sparkles like a diamond, there’s not a scratch on it, the engine purrs like a kitten and it’s even got that new car smell. 

It can last a reasonably long time if you maintain it properly, but most people just change the oil and the tires when absolutely necessary.  And while it grows comfortable and familiar, you never expect it to get any better than the day you bought it.

Deploying and maintaining a CRM system is a big deal, especially when you consider the surrounding business processes and employee effort necessary to make CRM a business success. Without proof of success, executive support for the CRM initiative will wane, participation and progress will slow down, and success will be increasingly difficult to achieve. 

As you endeavor to create a holistic view of your customer interactions, are you, like many enterprises, forgetting to include detailed interaction data from one of the highest-volume customer interaction points in the company?

The skeptics say that customer service is an oxymoron…that great service is a lost art.  But in today’s highly competitive economy, we all know it’s critical to an organization’s success. The question is this: Are you making the right moves to differentiate your brand with great customer service?

Consider some data points:

Forget optimization and fine-tuning: many organizations today are failing on very baseline issues of design fundamentals.

Despite the importance of the IVR to a company’s overall customer support strategy – a Purdue University study conducted several years back found that 63 percent of customers stop interacting with a company after a bad IVR experience – many companies are still making egregious mistakes in their IVR design.

Customer experience in the IVR is like anything else- what gets measured gets done.  Post-call surveys certainly help gather caller perception of the IVR experience, but perception doesn't tell the whole story. Unfortunately, legacy IVR systems don't always provide the data you need to get a more comprehensive picture.  Let's take a deeper look at the challenge.

So, what do you use to measure a customer’s experience through an IVR?  How do you know that they got what they wanted?  The answer to this question is actually straight-forward – you just have to focus on the customer.  Each customer has a goal when using the IVR application and has feelings about the way the IVR helped them complete that goal.  Contact Solutions has developed a CXR system based on the following focus areas:

If you're the Vice President of Contact Center Operations, you have a lot on your shoulders. You’re responsible for one of the most highly-visible customer interaction points in your business. You set the strategy for customer care fulfillment and it’s your job to measure the results and report them to your company’s leadership team.

Because your responsibilities lie at the intersection of customer experience and a huge cost center, you’re under the magnifying glass. 

Agner Erlang was a Danish mathematician.  A century ago, he developed a formula that affects your IVR capacity purchases today.  Thanks to Erlang, if you’re planning to deploy an IVR system on premise, you can predict how much capacity you need to buy.

Erlang’s formula zeros right in on the busiest hour of the busiest day.  That’s your peak traffic period, and unless you want angry callers you’ll need to buy just enough capacity to handle that peak.  Erlang tells you how much.

The trouble is, when you deploy enough capacity on premise to handle the peak, you end up paying for a lot of capacity that goes unused in the valleys.  In fact, you may be shocked at how much idle capacity you’re paying for when you buy a premise-based IVR system.