Your organization could be loosing valuable customers because they are frustrated with its self service applications running on interactive voice response (IVR) systems. That is the findings of recent research that is covered in the article "Customers dump companies with poor automated phone service (infographic)". There are some interesting statistics that came out of this research. Of the 2,000 respondents polled 83% said they would stop doing business with a company that had a poor IVR application. Almost three-quarters of consumers said it was extremely important for any customer they do business with to have an excellent IVR. While the voice channel may not be the first one used by customers to get information on your organization it is still an extremely important channel for your contact center to get right.
So how do you make sure that your IVR is not frustrating your customers and driving them away. Through analytics provided with services like Voxbi Analytics. Unless you monitor how customers are using your IVR you will not have a clue as to whether customers are frustrated and leaving your business, nor will you know where to make improvements to mitigate this issue. Good analytics are crucial to the success of your IVR and therefore your business. Be sure to follow this blog for tips on improving the user experience in IVR applications and retaining satisfied customers.
The Voice of Business Intelligence
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Why Do IVR Applications Need Analytics?
I am always amazed at how many organizations deploy new IVR applications without any thought on collecting metrics to verify the success of the implementation. The philosophy seems to be that once the voice application is designed, tested and deployed the project is completed. And as long as the application is “taking calls” no further attention is required. Probably the only indication that the voice application is frustrating and not easy to use by the customers is repeated complaints to the call center when they finally get transferred by the IVR. That is if they get transferred before hanging up in frustration or are not held in IVR jail with no way out. Frustrated customers and excessive transferred calls to the call center cost organizations money. Potentially more than the IVR systems and applications cost.
Even when organizations collect some metrics on the IVR applications it usually is not enough to determine where the issues are. The following chart shows how many organizations view IVR metrics. Either the caller was contained within the IVR or they were not.
The term containment usually means that the user went into the IVR application and never went to the call center. But why did the customer not go to the call center? Was it because they hung up in frustration? Did the IVR not allow the customer to transfer to the call center? Below is a more useful view on what is going on in the IVR.
Now we can tell how many hung up while in the IVR (Abandoned). And if they transferred to the call center was it because of excessive error and timeouts, or did they just voluntarily select to speak to an agent because they could not figure out how to get the information they needed. Transfers because of errors and selecting to speak to an agent are good indicators of areas that may need improvement in the IVR application. It could be as simple as changing a recorded prompt to provide more guidance to the user.
Required transfers are when the IVR provides a menu option to the user to get to an agent because the IVR does not currently support the task they want to perform. An example of this could be that your IVR application only supports touch-tone or DTMF input and the user wants to provide a change of address. The task of providing information on an address change is not possible with touch-tone input, but it is feasible with speech recognition. If you are collecting metrics on this and you know how many customers want to perform this task, now you can easily do a return-on-investment analysis to see if and when the investment into adding this self service feature to your IVR will pay off. Without these metrics it is a shot in the dark.
These basic metrics just provide a dashboard that provides indicators on the general health of your IVR applications. Good analytics will allow you to drill down to find the real problem areas. Watch this blog as we dive into more metrics that are useful intelligence into how well your IVR is performing and saving you money.
Even when organizations collect some metrics on the IVR applications it usually is not enough to determine where the issues are. The following chart shows how many organizations view IVR metrics. Either the caller was contained within the IVR or they were not.
The term containment usually means that the user went into the IVR application and never went to the call center. But why did the customer not go to the call center? Was it because they hung up in frustration? Did the IVR not allow the customer to transfer to the call center? Below is a more useful view on what is going on in the IVR.
Now we can tell how many hung up while in the IVR (Abandoned). And if they transferred to the call center was it because of excessive error and timeouts, or did they just voluntarily select to speak to an agent because they could not figure out how to get the information they needed. Transfers because of errors and selecting to speak to an agent are good indicators of areas that may need improvement in the IVR application. It could be as simple as changing a recorded prompt to provide more guidance to the user.
Required transfers are when the IVR provides a menu option to the user to get to an agent because the IVR does not currently support the task they want to perform. An example of this could be that your IVR application only supports touch-tone or DTMF input and the user wants to provide a change of address. The task of providing information on an address change is not possible with touch-tone input, but it is feasible with speech recognition. If you are collecting metrics on this and you know how many customers want to perform this task, now you can easily do a return-on-investment analysis to see if and when the investment into adding this self service feature to your IVR will pay off. Without these metrics it is a shot in the dark.
These basic metrics just provide a dashboard that provides indicators on the general health of your IVR applications. Good analytics will allow you to drill down to find the real problem areas. Watch this blog as we dive into more metrics that are useful intelligence into how well your IVR is performing and saving you money.
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