By
Joe Alwan
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Date Published: April 25, 2013 - Last Updated January 23, 2020
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Comments (4)
To put it simply, you can’t ignore your IVR anymore. But of course, it’s never that simple.
So, what’s changed? Why do you have to pay more attention to your IVR now? Well, customer experiences don’t start when your agent picks up the call – they start when your customer dials the phone. And today’s customers don’t tolerate IVR systems that waste their time.
Plus, the new generation of Millennials feels like it’s their duty to warn others by sharing their bad experiences in social media. And 83 percent of adults aged 18-29 use social networking as of December 2012, according to the Pew Research Center.
And while social channels broadcast customer frustrations, corporations are getting more serious about customer satisfaction, willingness-to-recommend and customer effort scores. Companies expect the contact center to drive improvements in these new KPIs. And studies have shown that agents aren’t the only contributor. Bad IVR experiences drag your scores down too.
In fact, your IVR can be delivering a terrible experience and you may not be aware of it. That’s because IVR reporting tells you only whether it’s performing as designed – not whether it’s working for your customers.
To assess your IVR from your customer’s perspective, you have to evaluate it in the context of the entire call. But IVR reporting stops when the call goes into a queue. So, it can’t tell you whether the IVR routed the call correctly, missed an opportunity for self-service, or wasted your customer’s time collecting information they had to repeat again for your agent.
You also need an efficient way to observe actual interactions inside your IVR. There’s a reason your QA teams listens to calls – because CRM reports don’t tell you enough to evaluate an agent’s performance. IVR reports are exactly the same – they just don’t tell you enough about the customer’s experience.
So, IVR optimization is critical to achieve customer satisfaction goals. But you’ve got 2 blind spots – what happens after the IVR, and actual experiences inside the IVR. Fortunately, new cloud analytics solutions remove these blind spots without forcing you to integrate any new technology. It even works with hosted IVRs!
Joe Alwan, Vice President and General Manager, AVOKE Analytics
Joe Alwan is ICMI's featured Speaker of the Week. Joe is Vice President and General Manager for AVOKE. With more than 25 years of experience, Joe’s vision for the transformative power of cloud analytics and customer experience has driven the growth of the AVOKE Analytics business, including building a customer base of Fortune 100 companies. Throughout his career, Joe has been instrumental in turning innovative new technologies into actionable business solutions. You can meet Joe at ACCE where he will be speaking at two sessions.