Contact Solutions Blog

Why Doc Lost His Faith in IVR Customer Self-Service

A fellow named Doc recently left a highly critical comment on our blog post about an award we received for innovation in customer experience. Doc wrote, “We hate ALL IVR. Get a live human being to answer my call or lose me as a customer.” When Doc encounters a new IVR, it sounds like he’s not even willing to give it a chance.  Why is that?

Many consumers embrace the value of self-service in today’s society.  Most people would much rather use an ATM than stand in line for a bank teller.  It’s not unusual to see people use the self-checkout at the grocery store while a cashier stands idle at an empty express lane.  Almost everyone pays a lower price at the self-service pump instead of paying a premium for an attendant to pump gas for them… except in New Jersey where self-service is prohibited and consumers are forced to pay a higher price per gallon.

If Doc is like most consumers, he doesn’t hate ATMs, self-serve checkouts, or pumping his own gas.  He probably chooses self-service more often than not because it’s fast, convenient, and it keeps costs down for the consumer.  Why has Doc lost his faith in IVR self-service?

Because he never had faith in the first place.  This industry has never given him a reason to believe.  So many IVR systems deliver a poor customer experience, it seems like they’re everywhere.   As a result, millions of callers have been conditioned to expect a poor experience every time they encounter an IVR.

This is a problem we can fix, and it’s a problem worth fixing.  We invested a lot of our resources to develop a way to measure customer experience accurately and a methodology to manage and improve it. We brought science to the art of customer experience, and that drives predictable results that make good sense for business.

We’re raising the bar on customer experience in the IVR, and we know from the data we’ve collected that callers have memory that affects their behavior.  If they have a good experience with an automated system, they’re a little more likely to use an automated system on their next transaction.  We can measure this effect, and we know that we can improve customer expectations one call at a time. It won’t happen overnight, but in time we’ll give Doc and many others like him a reason to believe.

 Get your IVR customer experience rating.

 

Tags: blog comment, customer experience, customer self service, Frost & Sullivan, ivr systems, measure customer experience, Self-service