Putting the customer back in focus
A CRM blog by Erik van Geest

Sure it has happened to us all. We’ve all been the victim of the Interactive Voice Response system, the gatekeepers to the ‘real people’.

An Interactive Voice Response system is that automated voice that you hear when you call your energy supplier, your local council or any other organisation dealing with many incoming calls. They are meant to be win-win setup.

The company wins because they save money and allow the customer to select options so that the call is correctly routed for queueing and handling. The customer wins because supposedly the call can be handled more efficiently….

To me, any customer arriving in an IVR curses under his or her breath. It is a necessary evil, grudgingly accepted because the product or service is competitively priced.

Now study shows that you can really only ask your customer to make an IVR selection twice, with a maximum number of options of 3 in each. Go beyond that, and the abandon rate (when the customer hangs up out of sheer frustration) skyrockets.

Yet the temptation to automate talking to your customer is strong. I baffle at  that variation which tries to answer before I even asked my question. ‘If your call is regarding your invoice, press 1′, ‘If your call is regarding a service outage, press 2′, If your call …. Some of them have the nerve to state: “Please listen to all options” before they present all eight of them. You finally make a choice and if you are unlucky the automated voice responds: ‘We are experiencing high call volumes right now and cannot be of service at this point. Please call back later’. Don’t you just love that one? Or the other classic in which a serious male voice explains the entire terms and conditions regarding your question without actually answering anything, finishing off with: ‘for more information, please visit our website, www.answeryourownquestion.com…’

Ever been through three levels of IVR menu, hanging by the fingernails only to reach one of these dead ends? It makes you wonder who put these together and whether they ever, ever put themselves into the customers’ position and walked through the scenarios before putting it out there.

It’s like coming into a shop, or your local bank and the person behind the counter tells you to listen to a taperecorder giving you 20 answers hoping that one of them might be the answer to your question. Why? Well, because then I don’t have to be here. I can be busy doing something else. Now, if your answer is not in these first 20, push this button and I will play you another tape with more answers. Then, perhaps I could be bothered to listen to your question. It’s the arrogance in the whole setup – listen to me first, then I will listen to you. Ahem, who was customer again?

I find this fascinating and wonder what motivates large, professional organisations to make blunders like this and then not even ever correct them. “So what do you do when the customer has a question?” “Yeah, we send them into our IVR maze, tire them out until they give up in the end”. “Saves us a bundle of money.”

The tip for today is that if you cannot build a customer friendly IVR, which in most cases leads to a human being, then don’t do it at all. The money that you save by getting rid of a handful of warm customer service agents you will lose many times over on the effort you spend on customer retention and sales efforts to counter your disproportionately high churn rate caused by your cold, messy IVR.

And you know, I don’t even think it is technology that creates these Monster IVR setups. It is the organisations who implement them without thinking through the paths, the options and anticipating the customer experience.

Call into your own customer service, pretend you have a real problem and see how it feels. Then do it again with a different problem, and another problem, and another. Exhaust the possibilities.

Still a cool customer? Then please forgive me for publishing this blog post.

Not so cool anymore? Then get in some good business analysts, map out the paths, clean them up and reimplement.

Quickly.

Before your competition happen to surf this way too…