Tagged: IVR

destructive power of IVR solutions and how we hope IVR’s are good?

When you are in business, probably mean you are serving customers, when your product or service sucks or not upto their expectations, either customer doesn’t understand how to use it, or customer need information about the product or service you sell, where do your customers turn to?
Customer care centers

Customer care is not the luxury you provide for the customers, but the excuse you buy from the customer, so it is our duty to ensure the the customer care is at it best for customers usability.

Ever heard this ‘ the ivr is bad ‘ ? Customers wouldn’t say that instead they say ‘…i am going to cancel their service, first thing…’ Customer would have called just for trivial problem that could have been fixed few minutes of discussion, but instead ivr put customer in bad spectrum and worse kill a business. I have already wrote a blog post on how implementing is nearly suicide for the business, i am not againt IVR, all i am trying to convey here is if the IVR is implemented wrongly that will result is loosing business.

IVR’s came into picture as a way to keep the customers entertained when all agents are busy, later it has become a medium to avoid customer and agent interaction in a hope IVR is taking care of every possible information customer requires.

Is it like people hate IVR(automation)? is IVR solutions are potential land mine for business to step on? I wouldn’t say that, its just bad technologies costing business, think of ATM for example, which is a classic example of self service success, that’s equivalent to what IVR does, the IVR’s should be planned thoroughly and implemented, where IVR is easy enough to understand even for a second grader kid.

ATM machines are the one giving me hope, there will be a day where customers accept IVR as defacto to interact with the business and still feel they are listened and cared.

installing IVR for companies – aka my company committing suicide

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’.

social media and customer care

it is hard to see any advertisements these days that doesn’t carry facebook or twitter symbol in it, starting from microsoft to a tech blogs, almost every business unit have their own facebook page, where they get to “like” by their existing customers and future customers, similarly with twitter, they get to follow/followed by customers and future customers and they keep track of brand related topicc. what is really happening here?

Mahindra and Mahindra’s Chairman Anand Mahindra is very active in twitter, i am fortunate enough to follow his tweets from the early days he has started tweeting, he interacts with his customers regularly, he educates what his company is upto to the public as well as for his team, he such admiring twitter from india, and someone who uses this medium perfectly, for eg: there was one customer had problem with his new mahindra xylo, after fighting with all possible service centers he tweeted his frustration, Mr.Anand Mahindra retweeted it and asked his next level manager to take a look at it(i think they are following his tweets regularly as well), after sometime i saw a article in magazine similar to “new way of customer care is born” where this customer happen to be Brit journalist living in delhi and pretty impressed with speed of the service carried over after Mr.Anand Mahindra intervened. this is not the one, there are several other stories like this with Mahindra alone, and there are many companies and corporate leaders doing similar job.

so thats one medium where customer real voice/frustration is heard and taken care of, thats the tone with twitter, and facebook on other hand, it works like a forum where we can gather all customers and future customers together, you might have seen “like” pages for many brands if you are using facebook.

so how useful it is for brands? this one works differently from twitter, i am following ford figo in facebook, ford figo has presence in twitter as well as in facebook, but i pretty much like their facebook page better, they are regularly updating their facebook page with offers, tips, information about the car, which is certainly useful for the owners, and the offers you are always willing to share with your friends if you are already recommending the product, i happen to face some glitches in the car, i wrote about the problem to their page, guess what??? within 15 minutes 25+ comments… including from ford figo page itself, customers recommended direct phone numbers etc.. the problem is solved. now thats innovative customer care.

how these two things can reshape our customer care industry?

there should be a app for twitter that integrate with supervisor/agent screen pop, which will keep searching for the specific keywords that is relevant to our product. there will be some customer tweeting about the problem in the product, also praising our product, whenever a tweet is found that require support we can reply to customer and be some help, this way we reach customer when they have problem, than they try to reach us.
there should be a app for facebook that will connect with agent screenpop, where customers request for help, our agents can reply to them promptly. apart from agent replying, our existing customers do take care of them as well.
using facebook fbml we can design calendars, chats, pages and apps for our products.

outbound contact centers – answering machine detection

do you have answering machine enabled on your phone? especially cell phone? i do have, both at my cell phone as well as my home phone, not the kind of answering machine provided by service provider, but the application, that will answer the call after certain seconds of ringing then it will read out the message i have recorded and then starts recording the message you might leave for me. then i can listen to the message and decide who called and why they have called, depending on that i can decide to call again or ignore or other options, sounds very simple rite? no rocket science.

but many among us, don’t have the habit of leaving the message at the answering machine, they will simply hung up, this is major annoyance, especially if the call is from new number(number you never saved) and you dont know what they have called about, it is even more annoying you are expecting some important call. there are many other annoyance and benefits with answering machine, let us restrict our views with the answering machine encounter at the outbound contact centers – dialers.

with respect to dialers, we have two known behaviors when we get answering machine as the outcome.

dialer drops the call when answer machine is detected
without positive voice detection we still dial and patch with the agent.

first is very much counter productive in my opinion, why.

assume customer is very much interested to buy what you are selling, unfortunately he did not answer and answering machine answered the call, if you just hung up you never conveyed the message to the customer at all, and he never will call back, if you leave the proper message with the contact details and product information, there is very good chance customer will call back
another condition is your message will be saved in customers answering machine, he will be calling you back when he really need to buy your product.
customer at least want to know who has just called, that is the basic etiquette rite?

second is counter productive too, why?

first of all agent time is wasted on a customer who is not available right now
it is completely upto agent if he leaves the message or not

what we can do about it?

the auto detection of answering machine should still happen, instead of dropping the call, we should be able to record the message to the customers answering machine, with the pre-recorded message by the agent himself.

benefit?

agents time is saved
customer is notified
the money spent on the call is fully utilized

i am not sure if this feature is available in any of the dialers currently, if you know any please let me know.