Don’t Make These IVR Mistakes

Stuart Dorman explains what you shouldn’t be doing with your contact centre IVR.

1. Structuring the menu around your organisation’s goals

Too many automated answering systems structure the dialogue around what the organisation wants to achieve from routing and reporting.

This can easily cause confusion and caller dissatisfaction as it becomes too hard for customers to determine the option that is most appropriate to their main call reason.

At best, this results in a poor customer experience, but it is also more likely to cause misroutes and customer distress.

The trick is to first understand what you want from routing but then to present the dialogue to the customer in a way that makes most sense to them and their call reasons.

2. Only automating low-value tasks

The temptation is to only target the automation of tasks that are of low value to your organisation. However, a core factor driving the success of any self-service solution is the ease with which potential users can determine whether a self-service option will meet their needs.

For self-service to be successful, the customer needs to be able to identify clearly what it is they are looking for and then be confident that the task offered will meet that requirement. Unfortunately, that link is not always obvious.

3. Forcing customers to repeat themselves

Despite the ease of maintaining caller data with a call, customers are still asked far too often to repeat information when calls are transferred between automated systems or between agents.

Computer telephony integration should have solved this problem 20 years ago – and recent advances in telephony protocols, such as SIP, has now made this even easier.

However, there are still too many examples where this happens, causing great frustration for customers.

With thanks to Stuart Dorman at Sabio