Common Enterprise / Customer Issues in IVRs

Impersonal nature of interaction

Automated interaction channels such as Interactive Voice Response channels by design are machine-like. They do not allow for the variety that is found in human interactions.

Unclear Instructions

IVRs are not designed from the P.O.V of the enterprise and not keeping the end user in mind. Usage of enterprise specific jargon and non-intuitive organization of products and services makes a caller’s experience difficult.

Inability to get self served

Callers would be interested in doing a certain task, but the organization would not have automated this process. Analyzing agent interaction logs could help in including those features.

Inability to speak to agents

Callers might have a query or clarification, and the agent would be the best person to handle this case. But, the option of speaking to agents might be disabled or made difficult to reach.

Repeated Requests for Information

Callers are asked to enter specific information, such as authentication, multiple times within a single interaction. Inability to find information that is being requested for ready-at-hand makes callers to abandon their call

Long Wait Times

Customers of large organizations typically have to wait for a long duration to be able to speak to a human.

Increasing Customer Interaction (CI) budgets

An explosion in the services industry means customers interact with enterprises much more frequently than ever before. Hence consumer interaction budgets and forays into software have increased. Enterprises are finding it difficult to understand ROI, to controlling their CI budgets and to measure customer satisfaction.

Increasing number of CI channels

Technology has made it possible for enterprises to have multiple channels to interact with customers. Yet, there is no cross-mapping possible of customer behavior across these channels to understand trends.  

Pulse of the IVR - A Performance Scorecard

What is the pulse of the IVR ? What parameters of the IVR need to be looked at first to quickly understand its health ? The IVR Performance Scorecard aims to understand the first-cut metrics of an IVR. The goal is to find out the values of these parameters, and to benchmark them with industry standards. These critical parameters are: Containment, Completion, Repeat Contacts, Churn, Utilization and Segmentation.

Containment tells us the ratio of callers who did not transfer to agents, and were contained within the IVR.

Completion is a process metric, and tells us the number of callers who successfully complete a task on the IVR after starting it. Low completion rates warrant a detailed look at the process, and need to be drilled into to understand the reasons for this poor performance.

Repeats is a critical metric which tells us the rate at which callers call back within a specific time interval. If completion rates are high, along with a high repeat call rate, it could indicate that callers were not satisfied on the first call, and that the organization's view of completion does not align with the customer's view.

Churn is an indication of how many callers had to repeat a particular activity, either due to entering incorrect information, or timing out. Callers generally face trouble when they have to enter a long string of digits such as account numbers, and many of them get it right only after multiple attempts.

Utilization indicates the frequency of access or utilization of the different menu options, and and can highlight the most popular menus and those menus which are rarely accessed. Quick fixes could include menus being reordered based on their popularity, and moving menu items up the hierarchy.

Segmentation provides insight into how a particular user type (Language, Geography, Premium vs Regular Customer) utilizes the IVR in comparison with other types. This information can allow the organization to customize the IVR or certain processes for specific customer categories.

Like any scorecard, these numbers only show a high level picture of the overall health of an IVR. Even though it may not showcase all the subtleties and interplays of individual parameters, this is still a good place to start understanding the performance of this interaction channel. In future posts, we will start looking at these parameters in detail, and also drill further into the other aspects of performance.

Customer Usability Analytics

Usability has always been talked about a lot in organizations, but practising it well has been a challenge. A multitude of technologies, processes, concepts and organizations exist in this area, but are they helping in improving the usability or experience for the customers ?

Think of the number of channels available to service customers: the physical branch or store, IVR, Email, Web Chat, SMS and customer service representatives as well. Think of the number of customer interactions happening across these channels. This is one reason why consistently providing good customer service is a challenge. Customer behaviour is programmed to a small extent and anticipated to a large extent. Misjudgment in customer behaviour anticipation leads to significant losses to industry.

How do we understand what is truly happening on these channels, and whether customers are getting serviced in the way the organization intended ? If there is a gap between business design and actual customer experience, how do we identify this gap, and how do we proceed towards correcting this anomaly ? In a sense, we are striving to understand and design a perfect customer interaction. How do we design or remodel an interaction or process so that the ease of use for the customer is paramount.

The idea behind this blog is to provide a forum where best practices and processes adopted by organizations are discussed and shared. Technologies and innovations used in customer service will be analyzed. Industry trends and forecasts will be looked at in detail. Of particular interest to us is analyzing usability in customer interactions, and how to improve usability.