The more that we are caused to demonstrate the latest capabilities of Genesys to our existing clients and prospective ones the more it is becoming inherently obvious that Social Engagement is a hot-topic!  We are probably spending around 40% of our workshop time on the theme of “Socially Engaging with your customers in the Enterprise Contact Centre” in the Anana Briefing Centre. Given a typical briefing that focusses only on the Customer Experience across inbound voice, outbound voice, eMail, instant messaging in the call centre, web chat, web callback and Twitter and Facebook is around 4 to 6 hours in duration then spending a block of 2 hours alone on Social Media is a fair chunk! It is representative though of the focus and interest in it.

Not one of the many day long workshops we have done has ever had the client ask us “Is it possible to engage socially without a Contact Centre?” but it is exactly how they all arrive at Anana House! They have 2 or 3 people in the Marketing team doing the Social ‘stuff’!  I think the reason that they don’t ask this question of us directly is because they are seeing first-hand the inherent benefit of Social Engagement in the Contact Centre and it makes no sense to them to have a team in the Marketing Department attempting to engage socially on their own (which, let’s face it is how most of the industry thinks it should be done right now)! Maybe its just so obvious that they don’t ask the question! Maybe they realise it will be stupid to ask it! Many in the industry argue that this is the case.  Indeed, nearly all clients come to see us saying that they already have a mature social engagement policy and they have hired external consultants to help them build a social strategy. Come on folks, the ownership of a strategy like this is not true social engagement is it?  The industry is quick to offer social engagement as a web-desk mashup of Twitter, Facebook, et al and for some reason this is the focus of the media consultants today. I argue that to do so without the ability to cross channels and offer it within the realms of customer operations in very dangerous. Here’s why!

Our briefings typically take the form of a ‘customer journey’ – one in which we model the typical behaviour and expectations of our clients own customers. Say, for an airline, we assume the mind-set and approach of an airlines own customer, and then explore the range of scenario’s and situations that this customer will find themselves in throughout the course of a flight (if a casual flyer) or as a frequent flyer who routinely flies.  We do the same set of use-case models for various verticals be they in Banking, Financial Services, Retail, Transport, Government etc and have quite an armory of use-cases at hand.  By encouraging clients using the Briefing Centre to explore the capability of the Contact Centre solution from the view point of the Customer the focus of the briefing changes quickly. It moves quickly from ‘operational handcuffs and blinkered view based on what is done today’ to one of freeform exploration of “what could be done if we were not constrained by our expectation or current behaviour; or even policies and seemingly hard-coded rules of engagement’?

Given I have just argued that Social Engagement is a hot-topic, and having outlined how we help our clients to explore what can be done; what is the key thing that we’ve noticed in the briefings themselves?  That too is the crux of this post!

Let’s assume for any type of vertical that the customer is going to use whatever mechanism is at hand to potentially engaged with the Enterprise. For example;

• If considering buying a product or service, they may do a fair bit of snooping around the website. Could or should we proactively engage and challenge them to a dialogue if they do certain things? (co-browse, web-chat…etc)?
• If considering buying a product or service, they may ask their friends or social circle for guidance or feedback (Less than 15% of TV advertisements are trusted; but 80% of recommendations from friends are! – socialnomics source)
• If they are considering buying, but have questions, they may ask those questions directly as a result of a trigger; for example, a TV ad, in which case a phone call may be the initial engagement channel, or if a printed Ad, they may browse to a target web page, and then request a chat session
• They may have seen a campaign or offer on Facebook or on Twitter and want to follow up. Is pressing the LIKE button enough? What next?
• If they are in the middle of the buying process then they may want to speak to someone if the issue is urgent, or if less urgent they may elect to eMail an enquiry; now we are into the realm of customer operations and customer services
• If they are an active customer, with an ongoing query they are less likely to ask social circles for guidance or direction on what to do, but are more likely to go on your forum or other online resource portal for guidance; especially if a technical product
• If the customer is aged under 24 years of age (not stereotyping by the way!) then they are unlikely to physically call in any circumstance beyond a dire emergency; they are likely to SMS, and are just as likely to avoid eMail as they are a voice call
• If the customer is aged over 70 years of age then they are likely to write a lovely hand-written letter “to whom it may concern”
• If the customer is somewhere between 24 and 40 years old they may eMail or go online, and pick the telephone 3rd
• If the customer is somewhere between 40 and 70 years old they may prefer to Phone, but be somewhat comfortable with eMail but will be very unlikely to SMS

Which brings me to the topic at hand. If consumers have different patterns of expectation about the channel and media that they are likely to use, then its key that the modern contact centre is able to cater to them all.  Not for any other primary reason than the consumer base that the Enterprise supports is diverse and has a range of primary expectations.  It is not for this reason though that I argue social engagement could work in the operational Voice only call centre.  Why wouldn’t it work very well?  The key reason is that Social Engagement is as much about capturing what consumers are saying ABOUT you as much as it is a capture of a specific customer services or product request AT you.  As such, many engagements back out to the Customer are going to start on Twitter, or Facebook; but require quick channel change to another medium that lends itself to the dialogue more readily.  For example, I may go on Facebook and ask my FRIENDS would you buy a product from the ABC Company? [a notional company for arguments sake].  I may get 4 or 5 responses from FRIENDS on Facebook who are familiar with the product or service at hand.  If I say something similar to my FOLLOWERS in Twitter, then I may get as many responses back; but one of them now that the Enterprise is Socially Engaging in the Contact Centre, so they might say “Our product or service is excellent. This is what other customers have said about it….” with a shortened URL to a customer quotations or references page.  Should I as a consumer wish to respond to this challenge from the Enterprise Contact Centre, what would I do?  Would I say “Well thank you!” and perhaps check it out?  Perhaps! What if I wanted to move to the next stage?  Is it relevant, or appropriate that I would want to share this intent ‘socially’ with my friends and followers?  Perhaps not!  It is here where Marketing Department driven social engagement falls down.  It is able to offer “Air Cover” and PUBLISH; but is NOT geared to dealing with the resulting questions. It simply redirects potential customers to working hard to re-engage through another channel.

Not only that, but if we focus on Social Engagement in the Contact Centre as a Customer Services tool then you can be sure that within the first interactions within the conversation the Customer Services Representative needs to identify the customer specifically (Would the Marketing Department know this in any scenario?).  This may already be known to the Genesys Customer Interaction Management Platform system; [which I'll be writing about later in another article] or it may have to be derived through dialogue”.  In this case the CSR may ask “Can you please FOLLOW US and DM us with your Account Number?” – which returns the HIGH EFFORT paradigm back to the potential customer!  I therefore argue that it is important that Social Engagement be taken seriously as an element of a holistic eServices strategy across chat, eMail, SMS and Voice in such a way that the conversation in the form of interactions may take place over any channel, at any time, with a focus on retaining LOW EFFORT for the customer but of HIGH VALUE to them at the same time.  Suddenly, eServices has new relevance as a Cross-Channels Communication paradigm, driven by Social Engagement; of which Voice forms but an element.  Not the entire thing.  Cross Channel Communications is something I touted widely when I worked at Genesys back in the day; but now; I feel, for once, that I might actually understand it!

Therefore, a more logical customer journey is not one where the Enterprise Contact Centre dictates to the customer HOW they may contact them; but by facilitating an open and more deliberate but flexible approach of “You may choose to contact us in any form that suits you” we achieve several key aims;

1. We maintain the dialogue, as in interaction which forms PART of the conversation
2. It doesn’t matter who starts the dialogue; the customer or the enterprise
3. We are ready to cross channels with our communications with ease at any time
4. We reduce the perceived effort that the end user faces about being forced to use channels that they don’t like or prefer (try asking someone under 24 years of age to phone you or write to you and see what response you get!)
5. We no longer have to strive for “First Interaction Resolution” [First Call Resolution in Voice days!]
6. We strive for service excellence and incredible user experience irrespective the media that they choose to use at any given moment in time or situation

Anyway, I’ve realised in this post that I’ve actually crossed several very hot themes and lines of reasoning.  All of these and more will obviously be discussed in future updates to the Blog.

The Customer Effort Score explained

Please see our earlier posts on the similar theme to the details of the formally published Customer Effort Score. This post serves to explore the Customer Effort Score from the view of a Customer Contact Centre Solutions provider; and to explain, more in laymans terms what the Customer Effort Score means, and how it may apply in our typical day to day experiences.  Better still, it provides direct examples of how to reduce your Customer Effort Score!

The bottom line of Customer Effort Scoring is to “Make it Easy” .  What is it?  Anything of course! Any interaction?  Any attempt of your customer to engage with you should be EASY in any channel, or any media, say, the Web with self-service or by making a phone call into customer services.  Both experiences need to be easy to do, and get the customer to the right information at the right time without effort.  Customer Effort Score philosophy strongly suggests (and has the statistics to prove it) that the easier you make your customers effort (the lower the score) the less likely they are to be disloyal (move or swap their buying power to your competitor).  These are some of the key and rather sobering metrics discovered by the Harvard Business Review team in their study;

• 56% of people report having to re-explain an issue erodes their loyalty
• 57% of people report having to switch from the web to the phone as eroding their loyalty
• 59% of people report having to expend moderate to high effort to resolve an issue erodes their loyalty
• 59% of people report being transferred during interactions with the Call Centre as eroding their loyalty
• 62% of people report having to repeatedly contact the company concerned to resolve an issue as eroding their loyalty

Even though I integrate and sell solutions to deal with these key issues I still personally go through at least 1 or 2 of the above findings every time I contact or attempt to contact a supplier to my family.  Loyalty to me is my stickiness to the organization I have a relationship with.  If the relationship is EASY and I don’t have to jump through hoops to do anything ‘difficult or requiring effort’ then of course, I’m far less likely to migrate my allegiance to someone elses product or service.

Customer Effort Score is a simple scale of 1 through 5 with 1 representing lowest effort and 5 representing highest effort.  The lower the measured Customer Effort (as a score) the less likely the customer is to break their loyalty to your product or brand.

The Harvard Business Review team found 5 key drivers to reducing Customer Effort.  I will paraphrase and simplify them for you next.

1. Don’t just focus on immediate call resolution or issue but put some time into dealing with the next one before it happens.The biggest cause of excessive customer effort is any requirement of the caller to call back.  Companies have learned to convince themselves that solid metrics in First Call Resolution (FCR) is the key.  It is not.  The aim to reduce the customer effort is to stop them having to phone back at all; especially if it has any bearing to the reasons that they are calling you now!  22% of repeat calls into the contact centre are directly related to the issues that prompted the original interaction; even if the company concerned closed the case as resolved the first time around.
2. Train and allow your Customer Service Represenative to deal with the emotional side of customer contacts.24% of repeat calls in the HBR study showed a clear emotional disconnect between customers and the Customer Service Representative. In other words, 1 in every 4 callers completes the planned transaction UNHAPPY, yet the Customer Service Representative closes the case as ‘resolved’.  With basic training and instruction anyone can be taught to eliminate this disconnect and reduce repeat calls
3. Get rid of channel switchingHave you ever heard your call centre management team saying something along the lines of “Wouldn’t it be great if we could get more of our customers to do this on the website instead of phoning us?”  I must have heard this hundreds of times from our customers when we are deploying Interative Voice Response at the ‘front-door’ or working hard on process engineering in the workflow and processes in the call centre.  I’m still astounded that our clients look at us in a bemused fashion to lend them some support with the question.  They are actually suggesting that their own customers are stupid!  I’m really happy to see that the Customer Effort Score article says it plain and simply; 57% of inbound calls came from your customers who have ALREADY BEEN ON THE WEBSITE!!  Cross Channel Interaction Management is NOT difficult, and it is not something that requires huge spending on technology or upgrades to make it happen.  Investing in a profusion of self-service channels is not necessarily the answer either!  Interactive Voice Response, Websites, e-mail, web-chat, online support communities like Forums, social media such as Facebook and Twitter.  I bet you are lighting them all up already; with an assumption that all of these as a whole will reduce the telephony traffic into the call centre.  They won’t!  Why?  Your technically unsophisticated customers when left to their own devices may try out all these channels; expend a lot of energy, become frustrated, bounce between a couple of the channels (without continuity) and then in despair pick up the phone in the end.  One of the things I really admire in the Genesys Cross Channel Communications capability; married with the Conversation Manager capability that unifies, concentrates and exposes Interactions with your customers across channels.  That way, if your customer gets half way through a transaction in self-service, but then picks up the phone you can immediately suggest meaningful ways of continuing the activity where it was left of.  It is subtle; but it is POWERFUL.  Beware your customers vent their frustration or ‘high-effort’ on social media channels! (See my earlier thoughts on the real impact of negative social sentiment in other posts for details)
4. Use surveys and feedback from really unhappy customers and focus on reducing effort.Do not focus on satisfaction (or lack thereof) surveys that simply try and determine “how nice the CSR was?”, or “Did we serve you well? Please score from 1 to 5 how we performed”…  Find out what the effort score was!  Why was it hard for this customer?  Are their issues service or product related, or are they related to the effort (the hoops they need to jump through) to get something done.  Also, you can pro-actively look to find customers that are ‘struggling’.  A simple example is “If you see a customer on your web site, that has clicked on more than 5 pages, or has spent more than 90 seconds in a group of pages that are linked by theme (say, a knowledge base or FAQ) then reach out to them.  Offer a web-chat or a co-browse and help them.  It is obvious that they are looking for something and not finding it.  In retail environments, good sales reps can spot a customer that is not ‘just browsing’ from 200 yards away; and they time very carefully their initial approach to lend assistance.  Just because the web-site is a self-service channel it doesn’t mean it cannot be partially or wholly supported with agents or Customer Service Representatives.  There is evidence in the HBR original article that effective use of co-browse and web-chat from the contact centre reduced calls by 8%
5. Allow and enable your front office to reduce the customers effortStop valuing the Customer Service Representative Average Call Handling Time (ACHT)! (One example of many ways that metrics and performance management make the CSR do a BAD job!).  Do not value speed over quality.  Statistics and Analytics are key in driving operational awareness of what is happening in the contact centre; but should not be used as weapons to drive for efficiency, efficiency, efficiency.  Targetting and measuring performance of CSR’s in 10ths of seconds is great for a spreadsheet exercise; but challenging them, paying them, incenting them, pressuring them to achieve FIRST CALL RESOLUTION in the SHORTEST TIME is self-defeating.  What is a better productivity measure?  How many customers you are losing? Or how many calls you are dealing with in under 93 seconds?  HBR strongly suggests that the call centre REMOVE the productivity “Governors” that get in the way or contradict making your customers experience easier!  An unnamed Australian Telecommunications network was brave enough to remove ALL productivity metrics from its front-office performance scorecards.  Average Call Handling Time did increase, marginally, but repeat calls into the Call Centre reduced by 58%.  Today, that company evaluates its Customer Service Representatives on the basis of very short, and person to person interviews with the customer; asking them directly whether or not the service they received met their needs.   Some companies take this recommendation to high levels; for example, Nedbank in South Africa offered its clients an “AskOnce” promise; guaranteeing that the Customer Service Representative who picks up the phone will OWN that customers issue from start to finish.  I don’t know about you but I like the sound of that as a consumer! 

My personal summary is quite simple really.  Make it easy.  If things are easy to do then they will have a positive impact.  Also, instead of trying to thing about the ‘corporate or enterprise’ Customer Interaction Management strategy; think about yourself.  What do you like and dislike in your daily life about dealing with the companies that supply goods and services to you?  Learn from what you like, and don’t make the same mistakes by adopting the same strategies against the things you don’t like!  For me, looking at Customer Effort Score is a Game Changer, and as a strategy for Contact Centre and Customer Engagement measurement it will have a wide and very relevant adoption in keeping with Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Scoring (NPS).  I think CES, the Customer Effort Score is here to stay.  One thing for sure, Anana embraces the philosophy head-on and it forms a large element of all our contact centre solution engagements.  We like it; it makes sense, and we believe in it.  The really cool thing that resonates; is that the paradigm of CES is directly aligned with the capabilities and features of the Genesys Call Centre Solution.  We have put a lot of effort into exposing the reduction in CES by showing how Genesys can help achieve these aims in our Briefing Centre.  If you want to see it in action at any time then just let me know; we’d be delighted to show you how!

Interactive Voice Response is “Art” not “Science”

Background

For the last 25 years or so of my career much of the specific focus has been on Interactive Voice Response (IVR). That includes stints running Sales and Marketing for a Speech Recognition Vendor (Vocalis) with its own IVR platform, then as a specialist in Directory Assistance which of course had a strong play in call “Topping and Tailing” on IVR (Personalized Agent Greetings and Automated Number Release…”The Number you require is [Readout Digits]”; (Varetis, now Volt-Delta).  Then a pretty long stint delivering solutions heavy in IVR with Periphonics (Nortel Networks). Then a few years with VoiceGenie. After that a good long stint with Genesys as their Global Sales Operations Director; running Genesys global efforts in Sales Operations for the Genesys Voice Platform.  (GVP just got cited for the 7^th year running (Garnter) as the leading IVR platform.  I like to think I had a hand to play in the success of that platform. ) Perhaps, after all these years with a key focus on IVR I can claim to know a little about it.

So, in this post, I’ve tried to collate 12 key highlights that underpin a successful IVR solution. Not from the perspective of the Vendor or Platform, but from the perspective of the IVR end-user; your customer!  These highlights are presented without priority or any relevance to their ordering.  As a whole, I argue, if you focussed just a little of your next IVR project on these highlights then your IVR solution will be well on its way to being ‘one of the better IVR solutions in the market’!  For the ‘highlights’ I’m concentrating the lines of consideration around the Genesys Voice Platform. It’s the platform we current integrate and deliver solutions with here at Anana, and I spent the last 7 years of my life helping to build, mould, shape and manipulate its capability to its current market position as the Best IVR Platform in the Market.

IVR – Highlight One – Ease of Use

The user must find the application Easy to use.  It must be intuitive, easy to understand and it must be absolutely convenient to the needs of the customer.  These sound like simple expectations; but they are very hard to meet without very careful human-factors analysis.

IVR – Highlight Two – Integrate

The IVR must be integrated into the business, the back-ends, the call-centre, such that its role is complementary to the logic and business process in operational customer care.  The IVR must be aware of the ‘current call centre load’ and be able to adapt dynamically to the pressures on the assisted service side of the call centre.  If queue lengths are long (wait times) then let callers know and offer alternative treatments (call-backs, Virtual Hold Technology – VHT).  When presenting a caller to the agent after a self-service interaction; make sure that the history/context and state in the IVR dialogue is presented to the Agent so that they DO NOT ask the same questions again!  IVR, without CTI and Screen-Pop is not doing its job!  The transition from self-service to assisted-service must be seamless, and help the caller.

IVR-Highlight Three – Make it Fast

It must be fast.  Your customers have called you for a reason.  They want something now, not in a while.   Todays market is a market driven by instant needs and little patience.  So, fast means the IVR must be QUICK, it must expose the caller options that they are likely to self-serve for, and they should be able to get to the options they need quickly and without going through ‘hoops’. Menu’s and options should be intuitive, and no more than 3 wide by 3 deep; especially for Dual Tone Multi-Frequency (DTMF) based IVR solutions.  The intra-prompt latency should be negligible.  If swapping from one dialogue state to another, say, moving from one prompt set to another element of the dialogue then the prompt latency needs to be measured in 10’s of milliseconds; not seconds!  I once did a study of human perceived latencies on the telephone, and 500 milliseconds felt like a ‘lifetime’ to the participants!  GVP for example offers intra-prompt latency of as little as 13 milliseconds; this is NOT detectable to the human ear.  If you click a link in your browser and it takes 5 seconds to render the next page; not a big deal.  Use the same interface latency in IVR and your callers will hang up before the next prompt plays.

IVR-Highlight Four – What is your Brand?

What is your Brand? How do you ‘look and feel’ from your callers perspective?  What Persona or Character should your IVR have?  What Personality?  Upbeat? Traditional? Conservative?.  Have a look at the brand logo on the right.  You instantly recognize it right?  Now, think about this question hard….”If you were to call this company right now, and their IVR answered you, what would you hear? Male Voice? Female Voice?  Can you see where I’m going with this consideration? Even the most mundane question like that is profound!  Get it wrong and your IVR solution will sound wrong, feel wrong, and will suffer less ‘adoption’ by your users.  They won’t be able to tell you why they “Don’t like it”….but often, underneath all the SCIENCE is the mere fact that the ART of meeting the callers ‘expectation’ has failed to be met.  Give the BRAND question a huge amount of thought. Call Anana’s vConnect Auto-Attendant on 08444 999 888 (UK) or +44 8444 999 888 (Internationally) and listen HARD for Brand, Persona, Look & Feel.  This interface wasn’t created in 2 minutes! Yes, its driven by Speech Recogntion too!

IVR-Highlight Five – Do not TRAP

Do NOT trap customers.  The IVR should SOLICIT the caller engagement but NOT TRAP them in the IVR.  As soon as your IVR comes over like a trap it will be negated, avoided, or zero’d out.  If transfer to the Customer Service Representative is an option in your dialogue, make it the FIRST one!  You’ll be surprised how few of your callers will immediately take that route.  We have all seen the huge PRESS activity on how to avoid IVR, and get through them; with cheats, backdoors, or even scripts on the Web that help the caller get to the Customer Service Representative quickly.  The IVR has a supporting ROLE; not a jailers role!

IVR-Highlight Six – Audio is a poor communications channel

Audio is the weakest means that humans have for communicating with each other.  In any person to person communication a full 93% of what the parties understand about the communication is driven by NON-VERBAL-COMMUNCATION Stimuli.  What they see, know, interpret, and perceive drives what they understand.  Audio is WEAK.  Only 7% of what people understand in any dialogue interaction comes from what they HEAR!!  The other 93% comes from other cues.  Over the years I have done transcription on human responses to IVR questions as part of dialogue tuning exercises and I have seen some hilarious, but business defying responses coming back from callers.  Some still cause a rib-tickle.  Funny these responses may be, but they kill the business case for your IVR if you ask the wrong questions in the wrong order and solicit the right response and the wrong time!

IVR-Highlight Seven – Interaction History and State

Integrate the IVR with other Self-Service Channels.  If a customer places an order on the website, and subsequently phones in to check the progress of the order it must be up-to-date and timely.  Better still, a transaction started but not completed on the web channel should be easily continued on the IVR!  Sounds difficult right?  No, it isn’t!  What can your IVR do today, if say, a caller phones in having managed to get about 50% of their way through a complex interaction on the web, for example, they are half way through completing a TAX RETURN, and find that they cannot understand the next question.  If they phoned to get specialist support (yep, you have no web-chat or co-browse either!) then does your IVR say, “I can see that you are half way through your Tax return, you appear to have stopped at question 18, is that why you are calling?”  This type of complex interaction history across channels has been available with GVP since 2006.  We are now in 2011?  Have you looked into this yet?  It has a huge and profound impact on cross-channel communications, and managing conversations with your customers as “interactions”.  Genesys has sold this concept as the “intelligent Customer Front Door” – iCFD, and subsequently as the “Conversation Manager”.  These capabilities are exciting, actual, capable, and deliver an extremely rich customer experience.  Have you ever been doing a complex IVR transaction that failed for reasons beyond your control?  Say, for example, you were in the middle of conducting a funds transfer over your local Bank IVR system.  You mobile signal decayed, and you lost the signal.  How much effort do you perceive in phoning back in, going through all the hassle of Identification and Verification, to have to start the WHOLE damn transaction all over again from the beginning.  Wouldn’t it be much better for you to hear “Hi, welcome back, we see you were recently attempting a funds transfer; would you like to continue where you left off?”.  Now that is profound!  It has a massive impact on the “Customer Effort”  – remember, the lower the effort, the less likely you are to lose that customer (See Customer Effort Score tags in our blogs for more information on this theme)

IVR-Highlight Eight – Make it Fun

Your IVR solution does not have to be dry, boring, and sterile. There is nothing wrong with making it shine by making it fun to use.  Make it memorable, different. Consider different forms of dialogue for different demographics. Many of our IVR solutions here at Anana use different personas for different age groups of users so that the experience maps to the expectation, language, cadence, intonation and dialect of the end-user.

IVR-Highlight Nine – IVR is not SCIENCE

With modern IVR’s like GVP the baselines of the platform are based on standards. Standards driven by wide consortiums of input points across the industry. VoiceXML, Media Resource Control Protocol (MRCP), Call Control; CC-XML, Web Services etc all create a common foundation upon which to build effective IVR solutions; almost to the point where the applications are transportable across IVR systems.  However, the fact that the science is no longer platform or vendor proprietary does not change the difficulty of doing IVR well.  It simply moved the projects from being “Science and Engineering” heavy into the “Art of Interactions”.  Today, good IVR is about Art. Anyone can create a basic IVR dialogue using VoiceXML. It can be done quickly.  It can be done BADLY with even more ease than ever before in the market.  So, picking the right IVR platform is still important; but more important than that is to pick the right SKILLS to deploy the resulting man-machine interface well!

IVR-Highlight Ten – IVR is not an excuse for bad queuing processes

Most relevant market available call centre technology from leading vendors puts a significant focus on queuing.  In simple terms; parking a caller in a manner that allows them to wait for the next available resource to handle their enquiry.  If you use your IVR as the queuing mechanism then you should very carefully consider its role and what you do with the caller when they are in the queue.  Do NOT tell them “You call is important to us, please wait, there is a 15 minute wait time……you call is important…..”.  There is a disjoint isn’t there between trying to tell the caller that their interaction is important but still opting to tell them that it isn’t important. Play appropriate treatments.  Consider inserting relevant media updates; for example, if you know the identity of the caller, it is easy to play TWEETS or FACEBOOK status updates to them from their friends, followers etc.  If the queue state is known to be lengthy, then offer simple call-back option, even if not as deliberate as ‘place holding’ in the queue with the Virtual Hold engine on GVP.  It is cheap to queue on IVR electronically; doing it badly is expensive to your customer relationship!

IVR-Highlight Eleven – Type of Input Interface

To deploy or not to deploy Automated/Automatic Speech Recognition?  There are many cases where Speech Recognition offers a great benefit, not only to the business but to the caller.  Complex menu’s may be offered, complex inputs can be gathered from the caller, and in some cases complex interactions may be handled with ease.  Higher tiered speech recognition capabilities also include “Natural Language” capability; with suitable design and implementation these can offer incredibly user-intuitive user interfaces.  It is for example, next-to-impossible to collect complex mixed alpha-numeric inputs from callers in DTMF based inputs only.  For example, a Canadian or UK postal code. Complex Account Numbers and so on cannot be modelled easily with any surety in DTMF inputs.  The main lesson; do not try to achieve the role of each domain with the other; for example, asking a caller to “Press or say One” to make a choice.  Your IVR should be clear and the caller shouldn’t have to be TOLD what to do.  If well designed it will be inherently OBVIOUS what to do for the largest proportion of your customers.

IVR-Highlight Twelve – Make the IVR Relevant

The IVR has a tough job to do. It works 24x7x365, doesn’t have a Union, and doesn’t take vacations. It is the first thing your customers meet when they approach your company over the telephony channel.  Please make sure that your IVR is RELEVANT and does everything that your customer needs and expects 100% of the time.  Many IVR systems have disjointed dialogue structures that have grown ‘organically’ over time; often at the hands of many.  These joints in flavour, functionality, human-factors, design, voice-talent and brand are obvious.

Summary

IVR has the capability to offer the Enterprise absolutely huge returns on their investment (ROI).  Often the ROI of an IVR is calculated in as little as a few weeks!  Good ROI though is not an excuse for badly deployed, designed and implemented IVR.  IVR is your front-man. IVR is your customer front-door. IVR has the perfect capability to link seamlessly and be deeply integrated into your business systems, business rules, contact centre and workforce management systems so that it acts as an integral element of your overall Customer Interaction Management Strategy. It’s role is to reduce CUSTOMER EFFORT, not increase it.  It’s role is not to prevent your callers speaking to your Customer Service Representatives. It’s role is to help them do their job more efficiently, effectively. CSR’s that enjoy complex interactions with customers are happier than those dealing with routine, mundane, boring and repetitive interactions.  Allow your IVR to reduce the burden of the routine interactions; and make sure that the right customer, at the right time, gets to the right resource in your Enterprise with the right attached Data.  The lower you make your customers effort, the less likely they are to leave you!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo I think most have heard the story of the Canadian musician, David Carroll who had complained that his treasured guitar was damaged whilst in the care of “United Airlines”. If you haven’t, please play the video, then begin reading this post!  

Having sought redress through the airline via normal channels David decided to release his frustration in social media.  More details of the background of this story are all over the web if you need more information.  The question is the real impace of this form of negative sentiment. It costs the enterprise a LOT of money.  Some estimates suggest that the impact on United Airlines of Mr Carrolls social-complaint cost the airline as much as 10% of its stock {$180 Million US Dollars}.  The video went ‘viral’ reaching over 10 million viewers in just a couple of months.  Indeed, it had reached 150,000 people within 4 days of posting!

The enterprise contact centre is in the perfect place to watch for, intercept and offer immediate redress for negative customer sentiment. Companies do not have to offer incredible redress to complaint, but it is important that they offer the complainant an immediate and effective response.  As likely as the complainant is to broadcast their complaint to their ‘followers’ and ‘friends’ they are just as likely to re-broadcast the enterprise redress with a ‘positive’ tone.

As an academic exercise, as I post this update, I did a quick search on a popular social-media engine; Twitter.  I looked for signs of negative sentiment about organizations; and the fray of sentiment was profound.  Here are just a few as examples.  I can only hope and trust that the enterprises affected are doing something about this! [Please note, the thoughts and observations posted next are those of the original authors and not my own or those of my company and I have xxx'd out the names of original authors and target companies]…

• xxx xxx bad customer service in Cebu for Laptop. @xxx @xxx
• xxx Is xxx twitter as bad as the rest of their customer service sectors?
• xxx I made the unfortunate mistake of buying a xxx product and have found their customer service to be unbelievably bad!
• xxx Airlines – Very Bad customer service: I called earlier and a rep. was so rude an I asked to speak to manager…
• xxx Chinese owner of a Lamborghini Gallardo destroys it in front of the public. This is due to the frustration with the bad customer service

There were hundreds of these sentiments across a wide range of industries.  On some occasions I saw immediate attempts by the affected company to offer redress.  For example…

As an experiment, I wanted to find out how long it takes for the web-engines to see negative sentiment, cache it, build a search profile for it, and make it available to the search engines. My method was to post a tweet and a facebook wall message for this article, and at the same time monitor how long it takes for the search engines to come and ‘sniff out’ the new content in real-time.  How long do you think it takes?

As you can see, the server itself is running a web triggered cron job, and the Amazon web crawler is already sniffing out the new article.  It just so happens that Google’s crawler (Spider) was also on the blog, but was finishing its previous crawl.

What are the first things I notice?Firstly the site gets hit IMMEDIATELY by the range of popular search engines, crawlers, robots etc.  They immediately take their snapshots of the content; not because I published something on the site, but because I posted about the content or the media on the social-networks..!

Look who arrived?  Bing, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Inktomi, LinkedIn, Amazon, Google…..all of them immediately and definitely taking a snapshot of the updated content.

The purpose of this article is to highlight the way the engines work, and how the impact of what the enterprises customer say about them is IMMEDIATELY distributed GLOBALLY!

For arguments sake, I have, say, 50 followers on Twitter.  They follow me for some reason (never mind what that might be!)…and they each have 50 followers. 

If I post a tweet that they each retweet then my sentiment will reach 50×50=2500 people IMMEDIATELY.  Let’s assume that each of the followers followers retweets, then you have 50×2500=125,000 people who know exactly what I’ve just said!

Anana offers ‘sentiment management’ as part of our solution portfolio with the Genesys Customer Interaction Management Platform. This allows our call centre clients and customers to include the ability to listen, carefully, and in real-time to references to their company being made on social-media.  This listening is for ‘positive’ as well as ‘negative’ sentiment.  Positive sentiment is re-inforced and redistributed, and negative sentiment is redressed. 

The modern contact centre is beginning the process of evolving from voice only interactions (conversations) into one where chat, co-browse, email, SMS form part of the ‘interaction’ suite that the Customer Service Representative manages.  Perhaps not all media at the same time, but with appropriate training and skills distribution it is possible to have the agents working on voice (real-time) for a while, then rotate to doing near real-time channels with Instant Messaging, Chat, Co-Browse and Social-Sentiment monitoring.  This affords the CSR a break from the rigour of a single channel of communications, stops them becoming bored, laboured or stale.

If the enterprise is going to offer social-sentiment monitoring then the redress needs to be effective.  I have personally (see my posts about my experience trying to get my landline service moved!!) witnessed social sentiment management being used against a negative post I put on social-media.  The redress sounded great; but there was nothing behind it.  Indeed, the social sentiment redress suggested that I put together a really detailed email of my problem, citing all details, my customer reference number, the order number and send it to the Customer Care team for action.  My effort (Customer Effort Score) to do that was HIGH, and when I did it I didn’t get a response until a week later!  Useless!  So, if you are going to do this stuff; then please do it right or don’t do it at all!

The bottom line.  The Enterprise needs to think very carefully about social-media; not just as a channel for SALES and ENGAGEMENT, but as a key paradigm in managing the customer interaction cycle.  When things go bad, the impact is INSTANT.  The engines know about what is being said about you, or your product INSTANTLY.  That makes social-media a REAL-TIME interaction channel; well, okay, perhaps not; but the impact on business is REAL, it is COSTLY, and it can be handled effectively with the right tools!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95aJ6fMw5eI I like this video from ANZ (in Australia). It’s light, funny and topical.  Watch the video yourself and see what you think.  For me, some of the key observations are;

1. It focusses on Automation – using Robots to replicate the traditional function of the IVR
2. It is chaotic – flailing Robots heading in all directions
3. It features ‘aggression’ ….”Exterminate, Exterminate!”

The video is right though. Most Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is poorly designed, doesn’t focus on usability and the applications are often complex having grown organically over a period of time.

Anana focusses heavily on the appropriate blending of assisted and self-service. IVR especially in the form of GVP (Genesys Voice Platform) is very carefully deployed so that the experience is appropriate for our clients customers.  With todays technology and interfaces Call Centre is no longer about Science, but is about Art!  Yes, VoiceXML and CCXML make it easy to deploy IVR applications on almost any platform. Being able to use these standards ‘technicall’ does not mean you have the capability to do it well! (Think about the analogy – anyone can paint if they have a brush and some paint; but that does not guarantee a good outcome. The art of customer care. The art of interaction management. The art of getting people what they need, when they need it is like hiring a really good artist to paint exactly the picture you want. More importantly its about painting the picture your customers expect to see! 

We use the Genesys iCFD, “intelligent Customer Front Door” and Conversation Manager capabilities; mixed with business rules and requirements of the client to ensure that the moment customers hit the call centre, via whatever channel or media, that they feel important, recognized, valued and that their ‘effort’ in conducting their enquiry or transaction is going to be easy!  Blending attractive user experience with quality customer care, reducing the customers effort (real or perceived) and the effective management of your resources are the keys to succesfull call center operations.

We focus on design and experience and work backwards from that to deliver extremely succesfull call center solutions for our customers. Hopefully we’ll never deliver a call centre that even slightly reflects the ANZ video!