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=osvb7Cz5Qs8 This is a hilarious Seinfeld clip that I have often used to show a scenario where Speech Recognition (ASR – automated speech recognition) definitely has a role.  Anana has delivered some of the highest density complex speech applications available anywhere in local markets; and we know at least 120,000 people are using our speech solutions every day!

There is a lot that you can achieve with a Dual Tone Multi-Frequency (DTMF) based IVR dialogue; but that soon runs out of room for complex transactions; especially when you follow the ‘rule-of-thumb’ that a DTMF menu should be no more than 3 items wide x 3 items deep (the 3×3 rule!).

I must have seen this video clip a hundred times or more since it was first used to describe the ‘role of speech recognition’ in certain scenario’s; and I still think it is hilarious.  There’s another Seinfeld clip of going out for a coffee with a lady who works as voice-talent for an IVR vendor; that one is hilarious too.  I’ll post that one soon.

While designing a new GVP Speech Recognition system, I was walking through an IVR dialogue design with some of folks here at anana today and it’s interesting how difficult it can be to elicit the required response from the caller.
For example, in a simple call steering application you might expect the caller to provide a department name in response to ‘Welcome, would you like Sales or Support’; but the phrasing of such a question could elicit ‘Yes’ if there is a sufficient pause between ‘Sales’ or ‘Support’.
The problem here is the word ‘would’ which naturally requires a yes/no answer and may work where there is visual two way communication. A better approach is to use words and phrases (carefully recorded with appropriate pauses) that do not cause pre-mature barge-in. I dislike the approach of ‘If you would like Sales, Say Sales’, Say this Say that, horrible!
Using the correct words can make the difference between a successful IVR and one that frustrates and annoys.
‘Which department would you like?’