Customer Purgatory: The IVR
- April 14th, 2009
- Posted in Systems Thinking and Contact Centers . Systems Thinking and Technology
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As a customer I hate them . . . and as a consultant I hate them. The IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system that you have to call and usually guess what to say or which button to push to speak to a person. The questions are usually asked about your account number, number of visits (Disney), phone number, etc., and after answering these questions you are asked to repeat them again when you talk to an agent. If you hit the wrong button, back into the queue you go and typically with another 8 – 12 minute wait. The IVR “choices” are not always the way I would communicate my order or problem and I find myself guessing whether what I said or pushed was “correct” and I am occasionally chastised for being so . . . ignorant. Or sometimes the agent will tell me no one ever really “figures it out.” I am not sure that makes me feel better.
Organizations that try to break calls down into pieces mostly find themselves with a significant number of lost or mis-routed calls. Working to standards (method, procedures, scripts or work volumes) usually increases costs. That business improvement and business cost reduction exercise winds up increasing costs and creating a poor customer experience . . . a management paradox. This problem becomes worse when people are removed from the call center in anticipation of “efficiencies.”
The current design of most call centers does not allow for value to be pulled by the customer. Straight talk: The poor service and inefficiencies (waste) are caused by the way call centers are designed and managed.
Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public). He is focused on exposing the problems of command and control management and terminating bad service through application of new thinking . . . systems thinking. Download Understanding Your Organization as a System and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at info@newsystemsthinking.com. You can Twitter him at “TriBabbitt.”
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I’m re-designing our company’s IVR system at the moment and have the opportunity to improve it for now and the future. Any suggestions on how to improve it from a customer’s perspective? We’re ensuring that there is consistency of wording with the branding of the website and options that a customer can choose to create a helpdesk ticket. Other than that we need to use skilled based routing to ensure the call is received by an agent with the appropriate training and expertise.
In our experience IVR systems make service worse not better and increase costs. Most clients we work with end up turning the technology off. IVR is simply a ‘Self (customer) sort & batch’ front end to a functionalized system, as such it offers huge opportunities for improvement by the elimination of functional design and replacing it with design against demand. However, it would be wrong to assume that simply turning off the IVR system would solve the problem. The IVR has been ‘designed in’, i.e. it solves a problem in the current management paradigm, so it has to be ‘designed out’. The process of designing out should start with an understanding of the nature of demand (Type & Frequency) and of the current management assumptions about the work, people who do the work, and how work should be done. If you are interested in learning more you will find useful articles, blogs, etc on the web site and examples in Freedom from Command and Control (book).