To best understand the complex problems facing and plaguing the layered, always-changing, rapidly developing world of interactive voice response systems, sometimes it’s best just to opt out and simplify (sound familiar?).
Stick-figures. Two-dimensional. Flat and accurate. Simplified.
Something like this:
The good folks at Call Center Comics are doing exactly that, boiling down the potential problems, pitfalls, and customer frustrations that any company trying to utilize integrated IVR systems face.
There are multiple lessons we can learn. Here are just a few:
1. Don’t Be Redundant
You should always be looking for ways to remove unnecessary steps in your call tree and any unnecessary burdens placed upon the caller. The first (and easiest) step is to remove these sorts of blatant redundancies. Customers will know when they’re having to repeat themselves more than when they’re just moving through a tree inefficiently.
2. Do Your Research
Thorough and forward-thinking customer research can help you become much more intuitive about customer needs and frustrations. The result is happier customers who get their questions answered and needs met (and, of course, better, more efficient business).
At Acclaim Telecom, we invest heavily in the type of performance analytics, tracking software, and technological development that can keep your IVR system in tune with your customers. Of course, we don’t recommend stringing them along quite as long as this particular strip claims possible.
3. Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.
This one should be obvious, but often in the quest to perfect and enhance their IVR system, companies will overcomplicate the process with too many options and too many steps. Sure—accuracy is appreciated, and customers will be thankful to end up speaking with the right department or the right people trained to deal with their specific problems. But if it takes more than a handful of steps to get there, you run the risk of losing callers altogether.
And, as always, make it easy for callers to opt out and talk to a real, live human customer service representative so they don’t end up trying to memorize these byzantine routes to the help and answers they need.
4. Expect Jaded Callers
Acclaim Telecom Services has been solving clients IVR and Speech Recognition system needs since 1993. Contact our IVR experts for more information.