Hi all this is a follow-up post written at ivrsworld.com in support of IVR, there is a famous sayins in tamil ‘too much anything is bad’, keeping that in mind let us proceed discussing the good and bad of ivr solutions for business and the end users.
Why does a business exist?
Business exist because it has a customer to serve.
Why do business support customers?
To keep the customers they need to support the customers, for whatever business they don’t with the company.
Why ivr?
To keep providing and doing mundane and repitative tasks.
How ivr is actually used, especially by mobile phone operators?
To put customer on loops, that they avoid interacting with the agents at any cause. Which will result in not just unhappy customers but a angry customer, even if the customer called for a trivial information and put to deal with the ivr which is poorly developed will result in a angry customers.
IVR should come in as a last option, if business really want to retain the customers, and the ivr they use should be very detailed and optimized enough, if possible expose the ivr flow maps through the company websites, ivr can be triggered during off peak hours say night hours where agents are not available to take calls and customers won’t be calling much, also when there is too much calls in queue etc, that is the ivr should be blunt enough to provide information like there is already plenty of call, expected wait time is so and so, they can either decide to wait in queue of drop the call and request for a call back.
When ivr is implemented, business should be clear about – why a customer would call them, and categorize it.
1. New customer
2. Existing customers
For existing customers:
1. Is it regarding a problem
2. Is it regarding some information
3. Leaving feedback
Depending on the business interest, ivr should be designed around above said category, and how much time customer should be allowed to deal the ivr machine, eg: if the call is regarding information that can be provided through ivr to customer. If the call is regarding problem customer shouldn’t be put to deal ivr for longer duration it will only annoy and end up angry customer.
As a conclusion, ivr should be used very sparingly only to do mundane and repitative information providing work, no customer would like to deal with a machine for their problems, i am yet to come across a single customer who says ‘ boy i wish this information is provided by a ivr machine’.
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