IVR: A game of "Chutes and Ladders"?

By Diana Aviles

 In my career so far, I’ve probably listened to a gazillion calls (or so it seems) in which the first 90 seconds consists of a spirited rant about the IVR. The complaints vary- from how they feel it takes too long to reach a human, to how the IVR has trouble understanding what the customer is saying.  Heck, even I have had issues with IVR’s sometimes.  My worst experience was when I called to pay my mortgage and when I would get to the actual payment part, the IVR would not understand me speaking my routing number and would hang up on me!  This occurred 4 times in a single instance before I asked my husband to take over and he was able to knock it out after 2 attempts.

The fact is – we need IVR systems in place.  Call centers require them as a method to efficiently route traffic to the correct department.  They also contain valuable data from a business intelligence standpoint.  For those of us in speech analytics, IVR Category Codes allow me to zero-in on the specific reasons a person has called to further refine listening analyses we perform.  However, let’s be honest with each other here- customers do not care about those things. They want their issue or question handled immediately and accurately. The other truth to IVR’s is that while they do a great job of routing call volume and reducing unnecessary volume with self-help options such as bill pay or even sending a hit to your cable box for you, they are certainly not perfect.  There are ways the technology can be improved to benefit both the call center and the customer.

IVR’s should not be disconnecting callers if they can’t understand the caller:

• If you can’t understand me you should transfer me to a general agent for assistance.  Would you really want to exacerbate what may have started as only a non-to-mildly volatile situation and irritate me by dumping my call thus creating a proverbial hornet’s nest?  If there are no agents available due to the time of the call being after hours, just give me an automated message that says you have reached us after hours, please try your call again during hours of operation so we can assist you.  A customer should not feel as if they are playing a game of chutes and ladders just to pay a bill or troubleshoot a technical issue.

Improved Accent Recognition:

• I speak with a Midwestern accent which I learned means that I am prone to raising emphasis on certain vowels like A and U.  Why this is something worth pointing out is from what I have been told, this contributes to my issues with some IVR systems.  The IVR hears my raised vowel pronunciation and cannot process my request.  Southern accents, in which words are pronounced with the drawl of a more deliberate cadence, can also complicate the IVR’s ability to detect voice. These are English speaking callers having issues- now just imagine having a thick Spanish accent while trying to navigate through an IVR!  We sometimes encounter this in SA where we have “false positives” that generate from accents.  For example in my early years of SA, we had a “Supervisor Escalation Query” that would merely hit on the word “Seven” if the speaker had a thick accent. Certainly IVR systems should be configured to understand different accents to account for such a wide array of language diversity.

 Keep It Simple Silly:

• An IVR is designed to help route my call to the department best suited to assist me.  I understand that there are MANY self-help options available, but I also know that I wouldn’t be calling and waiting on hold if I had not already exhausted the alternative options.  This is important to be mindful of in case a customer had a bad prior experience with the self-help solution. This also may be something your organization would need to investigate to remedy.

These are just a few examples of things that can be done to enhance overall customer experience and improve the customer’s perception of the IVR system your organization uses.  The simpler we make the IVR experience for the customer the more likely customers will utilize the self-help features offered. This will benefit your organization through reducing call volume for basic tasks.

Diana Aviles is an Operations Manager with more than 5 years of Quality Assurance experience in a call center environment. Diana's objective is to simultaneously promote and educate the world of Speech Analytics with a human touch; one which further emphasizes the importance of First Call Resolution and overall customer experience.

Follow Diana on LinkedIn.

Don't Automate Dumbness

By Michele Crocker

First, let me say, automation and new cloud based technology can take your customer support and contact center to the next level. It can do things for your support experience that we "pink squishy humans" can't do. Automation allows you to provide a greater degree of customer responsiveness than a fully human process can do. The benefits of automation in your customer support operation include:

1. Ensuring the right human is alerted of issues, to proactively prevent service failure.
2. Improving sales conversion and customer retention, preemptively addressing customer concerns and problems, thus deflecting calls.
3. Customer can self serve allowing them to get their issues resolved a quickly as possible
4. Reduce the load on human resources by shifting the mundane, routine, transactional calls to self service allowing time to redirect your people to those valuable relationship and sales calls.

On the other hand, we must ensure we don't just throw technology and automate dumbness, which simply passes ignorance around. Sorry here's the unsexy stuff.....the right automation and new technology can absolutely leverage your customer experience and operational efficiency, get it wrong and the costs are high.

Our focus should always be on providing the best service and customer support experience possible. We should NOT use technology to avoid interacting with our customers but rather enhance our interactions so the modern customer can reach us on the device, channel and time of day of their choice!

However, when new technology is implemented in isolation of alignment with people and processes, the outcome for customers and internal operational efficiencies can be a disaster. I have seen technology thrown at problems without getting the people and operational processes/metrics right, this leads to frustration within your support team and potentially a dramatic decrease in the customer experience.

So please, before automating your customer support, take a step back and invest the time to think about how you can align your people and processes with the new technology to provide effortless and frictionless customer experiences. Today, top notch customer support is one of the strongest competitive edges for any company. TakE customers from loyalty to advocacy!

Editors note: This article was originally posted on LinkedIn. 

Michele Crocker has the proven expertise to improve the customer experience and significantly reduce costs at the same time. She helps organizations to generate an effortless, rewarding customer experience, dramatically lower the cost per call, improve retention, grow sales and attract higher talent. Michele has over twenty years of "hands on" and strategic leadership roles within multiple Fortune 500 companies.

Connect with Michele on LinkedIn.

Make Sure Your Learning and Knowledge Management Systems Really Work

By Cyndi Chadwik

Learning no longer requires participants, including an instructor, to be cloistered in one room at the same location. The development of Learning Management Systems (LMS) and associated Knowledge Management System (KMS) provide employers an opportunity to present information to staff that is consistent, easily digestible, and convenient.

However, the LMS/KMS is only as good as its accessibility, how searchable it is, and whether or not it returns accurate and useful information. “The things that happen in a learning management system are less than ten percent of the activities that real people pursue when they want to learn something,” says Tim Martin, a co-founder of Rustici Software. “If you want to learn something, you don’t go to an LMS, whether you have access to it or not—you usually go to Google or a co-worker.” Developing and maintaining systems that deliver useful materials to employees when they actually need it is imperative. Everyone must be actively engaged in ensuring the correct information is available at all times.

Organizational change is easier to track, than departmental. One small shift in procedure may seemingly only affect immediate members of a group, but if a KMS article outlining the procedure is linked to others in a way that does not enable trickle-down updates, the user is ultimately presented with conflicting and confusing information. Their confidence in the information wanes, and the potential for them to bypass the KB/LMS altogether for the alternative (Google or a co-worker) increases.

The key is remaining on top of change management, and making sure the content in your LMS/KMS always reflects current and useful information.

1. Provide LMS/KMS that encourages and provides easy feedback mechanisms
2. Engage those who can quickly validate content accuracy and identify related material for incorporation
3. Ensure the content is easily editable and available for immediate publication

Ultimately, a knowledge management system is built in an environment which encourages individual ownership, provides immediate communication and successfully provides consistent and accurate tools to its workforce.

Cyndi Chadwik is creative and analytical. She has a proven track record of resourcefully meeting challenges to reach the best solutions.

A natural leader, Cyndi is unafraid to assume the role of to being the go-to person, yet knows the value of being a great team player to develop effective cross-functional processes.

Connect with Cyndi on LinkedIn.

How Technology & Customer Experience Have Changed the Employee Learning Landscape

By Melissa Pollock 

Cloud-based contact center platforms, big data analytics, omni-channel operations, and artificial intelligence applications have all contributed to a prodigious evolution in how we engage and manage customer journeys. These advances also helped drive customers' expectations for more responsive, informed, and accessible services, and service representatives.

Contact centers have worked hard to keep up with the pace of change in infrastructure, platforms, processes, and consumer demands, and frontline service representatives have been working hard too - but rigid adherence requirements and continuous task repetition combined with an increasing quantity of systems and screens to navigate, multiple communication channels to respond to and 'universal' skillsets to apply, have made a routinely daunting endeavor all the more challenging, even for the most motivated of people.

Associates working in these data-driven, tech-laden, experience-demanding contact center environments need resources that both engage, and add immediate value to their work. Josh Bersin described it perfectly last year in a CLO article - "The way people want to learn today can be described in one word: fast. We want entertaining videos that make a point quickly; and we want systems that let us find and consume content with the click of a button." That's the essence of digital learning and is it's the new normal for employees' knowledge needs.

Microlearning has become a prominent purveyor of digital learning - sporting short pieces of content (from a few to 5 minutes), often designed as entertaining videos with audio and animation, in some cases targeted to a specific bit of knowledge or single skill, and capable of being powered by platforms that curate users' history. In his digital learning article earlier this year, Josh Bersin said of microlearning, "We can now produce content that immediately teaches what we need to know, that inserts itself at the time of need, and is so interesting that we remember it after only a few minutes."

I heard Zig Ziglar say at a seminar nearly two decades ago, "Your input determines your output". To get better engagement and performance outputs, despite all the increased complexities, we need to give our employees different inputs - make it easy for them to effortlessly build knowledge and skills as part of their normal workflow, and empower them to take part in their own self-learning journeys. It’s a worthy investment when we remind ourselves that in delivering Customer Experience, we really do get what we give.

Melissa Pollock is head of Content Development and Client Services for AmplifAI Solutions, Inc., a disruptive AI technology that enhances sales and NPS performance by accelerating employee skill development with data-driven micro-learning and predictive coaching & recognition. Melissa spent 12 years consulting with both direct and BPO contact centers, transforming operations through behavioral coaching and human process improvements that aligned structure with people and goals, driving improved performance and retention. Visit the AmplifAI blog for more insights and use cases.

Connect: LinkedIn | Twitter

Customer Service Changes its Face. The Journey Will Never Be the Same.

By Anna Sabryan

We in customer service know how important our role is. Many companies compete to have the best service, and periodically innovate to catch up with ongoing changes. Customer 

service, at times, changes at a rapid pace. Customer service via social media used to be a very important part of online activities. However today, many intelligent assistants, or bots, can deliver many services. I'd never imagined I could be interacting with a chat bot, and feeling happy with the service and ease of the experience. 

Bots Impact on Humanity

Years ago Amazon announced Alexa, its intelligent personal assistant, including lots of commands and skills. Amazon Echo sales reached 5M in two years. Good for Amazon.

You can have some real time information, like providing weather, traffic info, music playback, to-do lists, setting alarms, streaming podcasts, playing audiobooks. Alexa is easy to set up, taking just 10 minutes and a few clicks to get it going. It seems perfect for any busy family.

Imagine the expression on my face when my friend asked her son a mathematical solution, and the child turned to Alexa for help. Bots and AI are now a source of learning! I have another friend who wakes up each morning, and asks Alexa the time. In contrast, I open my eyes and check my phone for  the time. While these examples seem minor, it shows the impact, and our adoption.


Customer Service by Bots

Bots are helping brands to deliver new levels of customer service, as they can handle simple, recurring requests, at a very low cost. Equally important, it is being delivered very fast. However, they will never completely replace human interactions. More complicated requests, and issues requiring deeper discussions, will always be escalated to an agent. Additionally, people still value human interactions. However, bots are a great tool to have as you strive to provide excellent service. They make customer service better.

Anna Sabryan is an experienced Social Media & Digital Marketing Professional and blogger. She is passionate about customer service, digital marketing, and social media.

Follow Anna on Twitter or on her blog.