With the explosion of new channels – particularly mobile and social – more and more companies are making the mistake of deprioritizing enhancements to the voice channel. A recent survey from Forrester Research Inc.* reveals how risky this decision is: Sixty one percent of those surveyed still prefer to call companies for customer service, and unsurprisingly 45% are making purchases via voice self-service applications (IVR). The report confirms that IVR remains a critical channel for customers to interact with enterprises. Some of our work with enterprises has found that their IVRs yield as much as 20% of total revenue.
Unfortunately, the Forrester survey also highlights a gap between what customers expect and the quality of the experience that businesses provide in their preferred channels. As an example, eighty percent of respondents indicated they are not satisfied with their experience. The solution seems complex – many factors could contribute to a poor experience, including confusing menu prompts, overly complicated task flows, difficulty reaching agents, poor error handling, and a lack of context as customers hop channels. Fortunately, there are processes and advanced speech applications available to enable a better, personalized caller experience based on caller intent and preferences - which in turn helps to improve caller satisfaction and often drives higher, continued use of the phone self-service channel.
*”Make Voice Self-Service Pay off Without Cashing In Your Customers”, Forrester Research Inc., March 28, 2011
Four Strategic Ways to Improve the IVR Experience
Adele Sage, Forrester’s leading expert on improving digital customer experiences, recommends four techniques to improve IVR experiences. She will be sharing her research findings and will go deeper into her guidelines on our webinar on November 29, 2011.
Adele’s first recommendation is to identify each caller and predict why he/she is calling. Your most experienced agents already do this naturally -- and a good IVR design should model your best agents’ habits. To predict why customers call, we help our customers map out a typical customer lifecycle and then identify where each caller is on that journey. Within any given interaction, you can expect up to four opportunities for predicting why customers call, depending on your business and the reasons why your customers contact you. If you focus your applications on anticipating the following call types, you can easily reap large gains in customer experience quality:
1. Continue a process: Look to streamline tasks for callers who are likely to be returning to a process they kicked off earlier. For example, proactively alert when a prescription is due and offer to renew it in the call.
2. Call out status changes: Acknowledge high-priority status changes that are likely driving inbound call traffic, or could enhance your product promise. One example is to provide quick order status for a retail or online business.
3. Acknowledge frequent tasks: Consider your highest volume automated and agent call dispositions and predict when they will be relevant to a customer lifecycle. A frequent implementation is to proactively offer text message updates to customers who request alerts frequently.
4. Intelligent cross-sell or up-sell: Finally, you can use these first three tips to accelerate the effectiveness of your in-application marketing. For example, after completing their primary banking task, offer customer information on related products in your portfolio.
Please join our upcoming webcast with guest speaker Adele Sage, Forrester Research Inc. to pick up three more insightful techniques that can help you elevate your IVR experience. We’ll also share stories from real world deployments where we have employed Forrester’s guidance and customers that are delivering differentiated customer experiences on the phone.
Proven Techniques to Improve IVR Experiences
November 29, 2011
1pm ET
Register
Attend the live webcast and receive a free copy of “Top Ways To Improve Phone Self-Service Experiences,” Forrester Research Inc.
About Voxify:
Voxify delivers customized, fully-integrated speech self-service solutions. Voxify’s patented technology enables intelligent and conversational speech applications that deliver an extraordinary customer experience. Offering the fastest time-to-benefit and highest performance, Voxify solutions deliver a superior ROI. As your business changes, Voxify’s managed service model ensures the ageless performance of applications. Leaders in customer service including Avis Budget Group, Continental Airlines, and Wyndham International trust Voxify to automate critical customer interactions.
About Microsoft Tellme:
Microsoft Tellme lets people say what they want and get it. Speech technology from Microsoft Tellme makes life and work more efficient, more natural, and even more enjoyable. By combining Internet data with a powerful speech interface, the Microsoft Tellme IVR Service improves task completion and customer service performance for businesses across 2 billion+ calls every year.