Adaptive IVR Blog

As you close out the calendar year, catch up with these top articles and videos.

The calendar year may be coming to a close, but customer service is only picking up for many of us.

So what does that mean for you? Has your customer service been naughty or nice this year? And next year, are you planning to be on the” good list” or the “very, very good list?” (Hey, if there was a “very, very good list,” you sure would target it, wouldn’t you?)

One thing’s for sure, we are absolutely committed to helping you stay at the top of the “very, very good list,” and look forward to supporting your business in the future.

When have you had the opportunity to delve deeper into contact center data mining, and in particular in the customer self-service channel? This is historically a “set it and forget it” channel, which means there’s a whole source of actionable analytics that you may be missing out on.

We get it, no one can be accused of being Superman in the contact center - seeing through the data, tools and technology in the blink of the eye to the core actionable answers. That would be great, but it’s not reality.

As we see played out in most enterprise contact centers – most technologies are decentralized, unintegrated and lacking common goals.

The challenges for you as contact center leaders and front-line managers are to deliver an optimal customer experience that satisfies the customer, while maximizing the value of your operational teams, processes and infrastructure. These conflicting yet equally critical priorities compound the already complex role you have to create a smoothly executed, cost-savings operation that solves your customers’ needs in the ways they wish and need to be served.

So what does this mean for your enterprise? How can technology vendors become true partners to maximize the pulse of your contact center?

Customer Service is no longer just about answering the phone; it’s about being responsive to voice, social media, messaging, video, email, digital web and mobile.

Addressing today’s digital consumer-centric environment is now table-stakes and your Contact Center technology has to step up and keep pace.  Working with clients struggling with outdated telecom and contact center infrastructure while others seize market advantage by embracing advanced multi-channel integrated cloud platform solutions is an eye-opening experience.  The conclusion is clear.  There’s only one-way to go.  That’s forward – and fast.

Perhaps you remember the refrain from the popular sitcom, “Cheers,” “Sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name.” Everyone wants to be treated as an individual.   And now big companies also are trying to make you feel like someone special.  Even McDonald’s, which owes its decades of success to conformity, is testing a create-your-taste menu.

When you think about your interactive voice response (IVR), leaks may not come to mind. You are probably more concerned about costs, the customer experience (CX), and system efficiency and uptime. But make no mistake, IVRs may develop leaks just like your pipes – and these steady drips can affect cost, CX, efficiency and more. 

Encounters with contact centers frequently fall short of the ideal. All too often, people are frustrated by long wait times and transfers to multiple representatives (who ask for the same information all over again). A poor customer experience (CX) can have serious ramifications. Negative opinions – expressed via social media or word of mouth – can impact your organization’s effectiveness in delivering needed services, and even its public reputation. 

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.

Neither customers nor an organization’s representatives wish to be at the receiving end of a bad customer care experience.  Customers, myself included, dread the level of effort it takes to handle certain customer care issues that should be relatively easy to resolve. In fact, my husband and I will duke it out (okay, maybe it’s more of a rock-paper-scissors effort) to see which one of us “loses” and gets to call the cable/internet/any company when we have outages or questions. 

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: