Ivr

[basil]

The largest complaint in my call center from customers is our IVR . What is your feedback on the most important highlights and corrections for customer prompts . I think it validates a companies customer concerns to make that the easiest part of the call ... any direction ? please help . . I m a newbie here and am very open to any ideas. thanks ... my new friends !

[GinaD]

Basil,

I agree 100% that your customers judge you on first few minutes of the call. And if they are stuck in IVR hell well than why will they call back.
A bad IVR does nothing but hurt the company and their message they are trying to get across.
My suggestion change your IVR! If you can't afford do to budget issues try a hosted model.

Gina Dohna
InContact
gina.dohna@incontact.com

[Kevinized]

Several things I have done to 'cure' IVR problems are:

1. Monitor the customer experience and measure how often the customer has to repeat his/her responses. There's nothing more frustrating than having to repeat yourself to a machine is not understanding. VoIP circuits are subject to time delays that interfere with the machines' accuracy and if the extra time is programmed into every call, customers will be frustrated by these delays.

2. For callers inexperienced with your IVR, provide an option for the caller to get help from a live agent in a conference call with the customer to learn the navigation in the IVR. Customers should always have options for navigating to the area they want quickly and are frustrated by having to go through a series of menus to get to the same area.

3. Always provide an option for all IVR callers to chose a live operator and it the caller chooses the live operator after entering some preliminary information, provide the information the customer has already entered to the live operator. Customers are frustrated by having to repeat the same information in one phone call.

Remember that customers with stories of frustration are spreading the word faster and more often than customers that get what they want.

[breeblebrax]

When having a user identify themselves, long strings of digits are trouble.
It is actually better to have two shorter prompts that cross relate than one long prompt.
Like 6 digit user ID and 4 digit passcode, instead of a 10 digit sequence.

This seems counter intuitive, but the number of times errors come increases with the total digit count per prompt.

IVR Software Developer