How to improve your customers experience when calling in to your IVR?

If you really want to make a positive change in the perception your clients have when they call-in to your company’s IVR you have to listen to them carefully. Avoid listening to anecdotal accounts of what is working and what is not working. And stop listening to sales pitches from prospective vendors that read “With this NEW IVR you will be able to increase customer satisfaction, and improve productivity”. I don’t need 15 years experience in the IVR business to know, that IVR and a positive customer experience are not necessarily in the same sentence.  The primary purpose of IVR is to reduce the cost of handling calls, it’s a lot less expensive than a live agent, it work 24/7 – 365 without benefits, or holidays or sick days, or overtime. IVR does not ask for a raise and in fact is you and every company who uses IVR are always finding ways to pay less for it. IVR is not a means of giving a customer a better customer experience; it’s a means of delivering a cheaper customer experience, when the cost of using a live agent is prohibitive.  You may think this is a harsh statement, however after consulting and building 1000’s of IVR applications, in almost all cases it comes down to cost, would you pay the same for IVR as you would for a live agent? Absolutely not.  If we agree on this, now let’s focus on how you can make the IVR experience a more positive one, when the use of a live agent doesn’t fit your budget.  # 1 is to listen to your client (the caller). Use those same IVR surveys you use to measure customer satisfaction after a call with a live agent, to measure customer satisfaction after an IVR self-service call. And be prepared to hear it as it is.  Don’t expect the same levels of customer satisfaction, you wont. Be prepared to act on the feedback and share with your clients what you will be doing with this information, (Designing a better, more cost-effective IVR service for you, the client). The biggest mistake companies make is to tell their clients that they are providing them with a self-service system, to improve on the levels of service, and improve customer relations,(your clients are no fools). Fact is it doesn’t, we, (in the industry) know this; however, you can come out straight-out and share with the customer how you plan on making these improvements.

 # 2 – be proactive and tell your customers how you will ensure that their feedback is used to improve on their experience while using the “low cost” self-service options. Your customers want to know that you are taking steps to make their experience a more pleasurable one, tell them how you will be doing this; they will respect you and believe what you have to say.

If you are working on your first IVR project ,I have published several guides which will help you successfully execute your project (they are FREE)How To Successfully Execute your IVR Project and Select The Right Vendor for the Job

The Complete Guide To Successfully Implementing Your IVR Survey Project

Using IVR For Lead Generation – How Professionals do it.

To Your Success,

Barnard Crespi

Datatel Inc/Datatel Communications Inc (IVR)

IVR Surveys – How you can increase your IVR survey response rates

How can you increase your IVR survey response rates?

I would like share a client story with you that may answer this question.

I was recently consulting with a healthcare research group who is a client of our IVR outsourcing services – we develop and host about a dozen surveys per year for them. They were experiencing a 10% response rate on a particular project, when the average is 30%. They chose IVR specifically because of the demographics they were targeting, and where access to the internet was limited.

The survey invitation was part of a benefits package information kit sent out to 15,000 employees and the package contained about 30 pages. I’m sure you are familiar with this type of package. Embedded in the package there was an invitation to participate in an employee survey. This survey was very important to the organization, as it was going to be used for planning changes in the benefits package offered to employees.
Needless to say, the 10% response was not what they expected, and certainly was not representative of their employee base; therefore it was of little use in planning their benefits strategy change. They were very disappointed, I would be.

The first reaction, by the benefits team, was “Our employees don’t use IVR”, and this is why so few responded. Of course, as soon I heard where the invitation was inserted; basic marketing 101 told me where the problem was.

Since the client had already invested in developing the survey, and had pre-paid for some transactional services, I suggested that they conduct a small pilot, a mailing to 200 employees. This was a simple post-card invitation, with the survey toll-free number, and access code, plus a compelling reason to call (“We are making changes to your benefits plan, and your opinion is important to us.”). Printing and mailing were cost-effective and the response rate jumped to 65%. Needless to say the client was ecstatic, and the next week, they mailed to all 15,000 postcards, achieving a 62% participation rate and a 98% completion rate. Applying basic marketing principals to promoting surveys, became part of our clients practice, and escalated the average survey participation rate for employee surveys from 30% to over 50% where IVR access was provided.

You can download the complete guide for free at:
http://www.datatel-systems.com/whitepapers/IVRSurvey_Request.htm

To Your Success,

Barnard Crespi
Datatel

Your IVR Project – Your IVR Messaging Can Get Much Better – Here is how.

A question I often get asked from both new and existing clients is the same question that marketing experts ask themselves every day. I will use the same approach to help you arrive at an answer.

“In your experience can my IVR messaging get any better?”Even after 15 years in the IVR business, my crystal ball tells me the same thing, “Ask the caller”.Do what marketing experts do, test your messaging, more specifically, split test your message to ensure that your message gets users to do what you want them to do.Whether you are using IVR for a survey, lead generation, or providing a client with information on their account, make sure that, the message gets the caller to do what you want them to do.
Is your objective to have your customer use your self-service IVR to check their balance? Or talk to an agent? (Needless to say that if the caller opts for the agent, it will cost you 5 times more than if they interact with an IVR).Do you want callers to say yes, to be contacted regarding an auto loan?Do you want more of your customers to participate in your customer satisfaction survey?
The type of application doesn’t matter, if you want to optimize your results, and achieve the return you are expecting. You need to test with real customers – otherwise you are leaving it to the luck of the draw.

This process I call IVR Optimization, (I borrowed the term from Google Web Optimization), a tool that you can use to improve on your web conversion rates by testing various versions of your web site.

Now, you ask yourself, what does this have anything to do with IVR applications? Its simple, the same principals of “Split Testing” apply and are possible with an IVR campaign.

Dynamic, IVR Optimization allows you to test different variations of your IVR scripting. This way you can identify the message combinations that produce the highest success rates. The success rate being; how often you can get the caller to do what you want them to do.

You can run 2, 3 or 4 different combinations and not just rely on gut feelings. You can conduct real-time research, with real callers. This research helps you optimize your messaging and yield the highest success rate.

The IVR world is a little more complex than Google’s Web optimizer approach; you have more caller/call recipient interactions to consider.

The good news is that with the right expertise and technical framework you can optimize your IVR messaging so the caller will do what you want them to do; you can move away from the traditional “guess work” approach to a systematic, predictable approach that will provide you with the highest return.

If you are working on your first IVR project ,I have published several guides which will help you successfully execute your project (the are FREE)

• How To Successfully Execute your IVR Project and Select The Right Vendor for the Job
• The Complete Guide To Successfully Implementing Your IVR Survey Project
• Using IVR For Lead Generation – How Professionals do it.
  

To Your Success,
Barnard L. Crespi

Datatel Inc/Datatel Communications Inc