In just the past few years, consumers have embraced speech-enabled smartphones and virtual assistants. Attention to detail fueled by analytics drives a constant focus on how customers are using these technologies; the analytics behind these services capture behavior over hundreds of millions of interactions—insights that go back into making services more user friendly. Because of the rapid uptick of speech-enabled personal assistants, consumers are developing expectations of speech-enabled services that do not match what the old designs used in contact centers can offer. It is becoming so important, then, to review and update all contact center speech solutions to meet users’ expectations.

An example of this was my use of an e-commerce payment service over the holidays. I called their contact center while many others were doing the same. The queue time was more than 30 minutes, so I chose a callback option. Getting to that point was painful. The service’s IVR did not allow barge-in; unlike anything provided by Google, Alexa, Siri, or Cortana, the IVR made me endure long prompts without the ability to speak up. At first I simply let the prompts play and answered when they were complete. After a while, though, I was just another raging consumer, angry about this rotten technology, talking over the prompts, causing it to treat me even worse in return. No barge-in was design flaw No. 1.

The callback defaulted to the number I called from; it had no prompt for an alternate number to reach. Unfortunately, the number I called from was busy with me trying to find other avenues. Therefore, I missed two callbacks. Simply assuming the number I called from was the only number appropriate to call back to was design flaw No. 2. I called back on another phone and got the same tedious run-around in the IVR until I was placed back into the queue. The wait now was 50 minutes. Upon a successful callback, the ACD dropped the call during a transfer to an agent. This resulted in my third call, and more fighting with the IVR. I finally made it through after several hours, but never again will I attempt to use this service.

During this debacle, several clues about what they were doing on the technical front presented themselves; it appeared to be a “home-brewed” callback solution. This is a classic case of set-and-forget.

Concurrently, my wife was calling a large airline’s contact center, known for its customer-friendly culture. Due to the impending holidays, its call wait times were long and she too agreed to receive a callback. She had no speech recognition barriers; she was quite happy with the offered callback service and had full confidence it would work. That is, until late in the day when she had not received a callback, and now timing was becoming urgent. Another call in, another callback offered, and this time she declined it. After waiting in queue for more than an hour, she connected to a customer service rep who informed her that the airline abandons callbacks if the queue is longer than 60 minutes. “It says it somewhere on the website!” Yes, it does, deeply buried on the site, and not mentioned anywhere in its voice channel. That airline went from Great to Hate in our home in one day.

In both cases, it appears that the companies are trying to offer customer-friendly service, but their lack of constantly reviewing their service and ensuring that it meets customers’ usage habits and expectations ends up exacerbating problems and producing negative views.

Relying on experienced cloud-enabled callback providers such as Fonolo or Virtual Hold will ensure that customers view callbacks positively—and not as yet another way to keep from talking with customers.

In my current role, I have the pleasure of observing many different organizations’ deployments of outsourced speech enabled IVRs (hereafter, IVR.) Having been on the delivery side for ten years, it has been very enlightening to be on the customer side.

Most often, we see the classic command and control relationship between customers and their infrastructure partners (vendors) where the customer provides requirements in the form of what, when and where.  Sometimes customer issue commands on virtual cocktail napkins, while others have cadres of Project Managers, Application Owners, various IT managers and business managers involved.

Having a well-staffed and experienced team managing your outsourced IVRs increases the likelihood of good outcomes.  However, even very professional command and control management structures eventually begin to break down and mistakes begin to occur.  When call volumes are high, and/or complexity of applications and routing are even moderate, these mistakes quickly snowball.   This is the most common status of outsourced IVRs where our customers ask for our help. Usually, a significant effort is required to correct the situation.

Business publications constantly cover the reasons why command and control methods break down, so we will not get into details here. In short, disparate organizations change at different rates of speed. Therefore, the dance you started with breaks down when the lead dancer changes the dance or the dance partner changes and cannot seem to follow the lead.

We observe a common theme resonating among the most successful customers; treat your entire infrastructure like a well-trained orchestra.  Each performer has a distinct role, and every one of them must be up to the task of playing their piece. As the maestro, you as the customer need to carefully choose your players, and constantly listen to them to ensure that they are not getting lazy and not practicing.  You should also have a backup player in the wings, ready to take over if your first chair player is unable to fulfill their role.

To extend the analogy, renowned orchestras exist due to strong conductors who carefully listen to their performers, and strong performers who listen to their compatriots while taking their lead from the maestro.

This means that your telecom provider, your outsourcing platform provider, application management and business management and other team members all need to meet regularly in shared meetings to review performance, and plan future offerings.  Meeting with each vendor separately and trying to coordinate through command and control results in more effort placed in communication, more risk in miscommunication, and timing discrepancies. Imagine trying to listen to the Nutcracker Suite when every player practices separately, never meeting until the Big Performance. Moreover, doing so without first tuning as a group. OUCH!

One of our banking customers regularly meets in this fashion, and the meetings are quite humdrum.  Everyone is well aware of upcoming changes in detail, all buy into the coordination and all risks are visible within the entire group.

Call volumes are staggering even in the banking industry; however, the lack of turbulence is astounding to anyone who has not experienced an orchestrated IVR management offering. Note that the telecom and IVR vendors are well known and involved with other organizations who attempt to manage by command and control. Therefore, there is no magic vendor sauce. It is all about bringing your vendors together, treating them like an expensive, yet experienced and well-practiced orchestra.  When you move between command and control to orchestrated environments, it is beautiful music to your ears!

Try it by inviting all of your vendors in for a joint meeting. Ask for the proper representatives, those who actually deliver or manage delivery, and get a sense of whether you have the right players on your team. If they cannot play well together, it is likely time to get rid of that player who makes everyone else cringe. However, the most likely result is that they will play well together; they were just looking for a strong maestro.

Speech recognition is continually improving. Note the functionality that Google Now and Apple Siri provide from devices that are notably difficult to interact with using text.  However, has it really changed much in the contact center? Sure, a few large corporations have implemented natural language understanding or “conversational” IVR apps using traditional speech recognition. The seven-digit cost, covering the cost of the software and ongoing very expensive tuning behind these apps precludes anyone but the largest organizations from deploying these solutions.

However, even for well-designed apps, the current state of ASR still limits the ability to expand self-service past very simple apps that are limited to only a few caller inputs. The danger of even moderately complex speech-enabled apps is the dreaded “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand. Could you please repeat that?” which usually drives the caller to press zero or repeat “Operator, operator!”

So should we give up all hope for speech recognition in the contact center unless you are a massive organization with plenty of cash?  Absolutely not! Human Assisted Understanding^TM, a technology developed by Interactions LLC, is an extremely potent and cost effective means to improve caller intent and expand speech-enabled self-service.  Variations of it have been available for over ten years, but the market uptake was not high until two or three years ago. Adaptive-Understanding^TM works by understanding an utterance’s confidence level, and will send an utterance that fails to meet the ASR’s ability to understand the utterance to a human along with a screen pop of most likely matches.

Over the history of the HAU^TM and similar offerings, several companies have used different role titles, but in business conversations, I tend to use “secret agent.”  The secret agent matches the utterance to the correct match and the application progresses without the caller knowing that a human was working behind the scene for several seconds. The human ear is not perfect, but it still is much better at disambiguation of speech than current speech recognition technology.  The NLU apps mentioned earlier require significant amounts of tuning to ensure the grammars contain enough words that will optimistically match almost all of callers’ possible utterances, but not too many words to allow misidentification of non-targeted words as the correct utterance.  Moreover, the tuning to keep the voices of two humans, or even just the caller’s utterances on track (to the IVR: “Tomorrow” immediately followed to the child/pet, “I said stop it!”) is a complex balancing act. It falls somewhere between science and art, and does not come cheap.

In contrast, HAU^TM is very accurate immediately upon deployment and when combined with additional Adaptive-Understanding^TM technology, it quickly and cost effectively tunes the ASR grammars. To be transparent, I have been a major proponent of the capabilities of HAU^TM since it first hit the market. Unveil Technologies first offered similar technology, but Microsoft acquired them in 2005 and pulled the offering from the market. At least two others attempted to replicate the technology, but for various reasons, the market did not adopt it.  Several years ago, Interactions LLC began offering HAU^TM, just as the market awoke to the understanding of what HAU^TM can do for them at a cost effective price point. Late last year, Interactions and AT&T completed a transaction where Interactions took possession of AT&T’s Watson natural language understanding technologies, along with several other assets. This acquisition bodes well for continuous improvement in use of Adaptive-Understanding^TM for tuning, as well as extension into additional customer contact channels.

Extremely successful hosted, speech-enabled virtual assistants with high ROIs are now within the reach of organizations big and small.  It is great news for callers, and organizations’ service and sales teams alike. Imagine hospitality reservations or the scheduling/changing/cancellation of home service appointments, perhaps full enrollment into health insurance programs; all accomplished 100% via voice virtual agents. To spark your imagination further, what if these voice channel virtual agents perform so well, they have higher NPS and customer satisfaction scores than when your own employees handle those calls?  I have been involved with implementation of the technology, and it truly is here, now.

For those of us old enough to remember, this is where Don Adams as secret agent Maxwell Smart in the Get Smart! TV series would likely remark: “Would you believe…..the old IVRs transforming into virtual assistants trick?”

The amount of electrons wasted communicating that “Generational changes are going to change your contact center!” are enough to fuel a large fleet of Tesla vehicles for mileage equal to a trip to Mars and back.

I had to re-write the opening of this because I sounded like a grumpy old man. You know the type, “Get off my lawn you darned kids!”  Except I live in Arizona and there are no lawns.  Well, there are those AstroTurf lawns that Snowbirds have in Sun City. If there are kids running all over them, then it serves the little buggers right to slip, fall and hurt themselves on that plastic.  Toughens them up for the NFL.

Over the past several years, the contact center technology spiel overly focuses on generational differences. According to the pandering pundits, those of us older than 32 years old just do not get it, the Millennials and younger suddenly changed their activities from everyone older than 32.   Sounds good at first glance, but the more researchers have looked into this, the more they find few differences between generations.

NICE’s Global Customer Experience survey provides a strong counter argument to the “everything’s changing” crowd.  Nuance’s recent research provides a clear view that there are little to no differences between generations’ customer service expectations.

Organizations should quit spending time trying to devise artificial generational differences while looking for quick fixes. Instead, they need to get back to basics and ensure that they are performing at a high level across people, process and technology, including existing interaction channels. Before opening up new channels, make sure that you are performing well in your existing channels.  Moreover, quit listening to the chattering classes who are not on target about the need to expand support across an increasing number of channels. CXAct’s research outlined in this HBR article mirrors VoxPeritus’ experience; too many channels creates poor service across all channels.  Moreover, customers are not stuck on a particular channel, regardless of their age; they want results regardless of channel.

Since self-service started in the late 80’s with the advent of IVR, then took another major jump ahead in the mid 90’s with companies and their customers adopting the Internet, the complexity of calls increased dramatically. Quick, easy informational calls went away, but additional complex calls replaced them.

This started twenty plus years ago! Nothing has massively changed since then.  So consider the changes customer service teams had to adjust to from 1990-1997, during that time of increased self-service and additional communication channels. If your company did not adjust then, you are well behind the curve and likely are feeling the pain, as are your customers.

1. Hike the caliber of new hires

Even if your organization always had great hires, the huge uptake in self-service eliminated the safety net of easy calls that could be “peeled out” for new hires.  This change required raising the bar for new hires, simply because new CSRs coming out of training had to manage interactions that are more complex.

For most contact centers, prior to 1995, writing skills were never a high priority as nearly every contact center communication with customers was over the phone.  Post 1995, many organizations were communicating with customers via email through their websites, and the requirement increased for a good portion of the new hires to have good reading and writing skills.

2. Adjust training

Remember, most of the “no-brainer” informational calls went away, so peeling them away from complex calls became nearly impossible.  Training that could have been staggered between limited classroom and more on the floor training was no longer possible (though my experience as a consumer tells me that all too many organizations do not understand this!)

3. Adjust the complaint handling process

Previously, most customers voiced their complaints over the phone.  Organizations who had a very tight complaint handling process in place now had to adjust their process to include an additional channel that was asynchronous, and fraught with misunderstandings created by the written word, rather than the better understanding of emotions via synchronous voice.  Email was the predecessor to Facebook messages and Tweets.  Yet, very few organizations get it right even twenty years later.

Unless you are doing an excellent job today with email, why would you think that your organization can provide adequate service levels with their social media equivalents of Facebook and Twitter?  Now your failure to provide good service and swiftly provide service recovery is front and center for the entire world to see.

Per the HBR article referenced above, instead of allocating time and resources on attempting to provide service through even more channels, focus instead on your business basics and what causes customers to rant about your service on social media in the first place.  If you improve your service via existing channels, including providing the means for customers to escalate service complaints through existing channels, you might surprise your Marketing team with a swift reduction of complaints in the digital public commons.

If and only if, you can provide good to excellent service in your existing channels, should you consider adding new channels.

4. Improve self-service analytics

Customers want to self-serve. Constantly analyze every facet of your digital and voice self-service channels then strive to make improvements wherever possible.  Remember, the ROI is not just measured in reduced caseloads for your CSRs; it includes reduced customer effort, and increases customer loyalty.

VoxPeritus consistently finds that nearly every company overlooks this.  Where there are efforts applied, companies expend efforts in a stovepipe fashion, with no coordination between the digital and voice channels. Furthermore, it is either a one and done activity, or an occasional review, when in fact, it should be part of the fabric of the organizations’ operations.

Amazon takes a ruthless approach; every single voice call is considered a failure, and the reasons behind each call are analyzed for ways to prevent the need for a voice (and I should add, email) contact in the future.

Deep Customer Touchpoint Analysis Across Digital and Voice Channels

5. Test every aspect of your digital and voice channels, then continue to monitor them

Then constantly monitor these channels. Nearly every transaction I have these days has at least one technical failure somewhere in the channels.

A perfect example: this week I needed to correct an airline’s merger of my two loyalty programs. I could not find any difference in data between the two accounts, nor eventually could a CSR. Yet the data merger failed. Failure #1.  I logged into the new web site to merge the accounts, and the site would not recognize the account number that had the vast majority of miles. Failure #2. I phoned the loyalty toll free number, was in queue for approximately 10 minutes, and then the line dropped.  I dialed back in several times but was unable to connect.  I later discovered their phone system failed. They tested the systems involved; yet do not actively monitor their voice channel. Failure #3.  I eventually was able to merge the accounts, but the entire process stuck another stake in the heart of our nearly dead relationship.

All too often, VoxPeritus has test results supplied by companies, yet there are no follow up tests, nor ongoing monitoring.  What has changed over the past twenty years is that there are now automated testing and monitoring solutions from companies like our partner Cyara, so there are absolutely no good reasons not to adopt a strategic testing and monitoring program.

6. Consider changing your organizational ownership of all channels, or the funding of it

The vast majority of digital channels are owned and managed by IT and/or Marketing. Think about it…. what if in 1994, IT suddenly took over store management of Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus and Wal-Mart?  How would those companies be doing now?  “We’ll meet with the sales team every week or two and coordinate efforts.  In the meantime, leave it to us.”

Yet that is exactly what has happened with the advent of the digital channel; companies relegate customer service to at best an advisor, at worst, digital teams completely owning the digital channels with little to no customer service oversight.  If companies cannot tolerate the organizational change, then use a financial carrot and stick approach.  Make reduction of customer support calls a target for the digital channel. If they miss the target, it comes out of their pay and the bonuses go to the customer service teams for once again playing the safety net role.

All customer preference data, regardless if it comes from voice or data vendors point to customers preferring digital self-service.  Increasing call volumes in the voice channel point a strong finger at the digital channel as failing customers all too often.  Again, after twenty years! In most organizations, ongoing abandonment in the voice channel would mean a change in customer service executive management.  Yet because contact centers’ voice channel provides the safety net to the digital channel, those executives who own the digital channels get a free pass.

7. Quit chasing bright and shiny objects

There is no panacea to provide excellent customer service.  It is a balancing act of relatively simple activities, coupled with good people skills. Contact centers use technologies that do not change overnight.  The people who are pandering sudden change are trying to take your company’s money, and they will use whatever tactic works.  Do not be one of those who fall for the bright and shiny toy sales tactic.

Plenty of analysts and pundits post all over the Internet 24/7 who constantly tout your need to “change the status quo and move on to something new!” It seems to me that given their prodigious pandering, they cannot have enough time to practice customer service. In addition, a not too secret reality about the analyst community is that they receive compensation in different forms for helping sell “stuff.” Certainly some of the positions they take are consistent over time and not tied to particular firms.  Nevertheless, all too often, they base their positions on buzzwords and the latest fad just to justify why you need to buy new stuff.  Hence my rant here about the Millennial, Gen Y, Gen Z hoopla.  Do not fall for it!  Now quit reading what I have to say and get back to your business and focus on the basics.

Kevin Brown began his career in sales, where he set company records for gaining new customers with American Greetings (breaking 80 years of records), Airborne Express and TNT Express Worldwide. As TNT’s Global Service Quality Director, he was involved in Customer Service, Sales and Operations improvements around the globe. His career transition to customer support technologies began at DHL in 1993, during the time that DHL’s customer service organization received awards for top contact center practices in the world from numerous organizations.

Mr. Brown’s continuing work in contact center technologies focuses on the target of sustainable superb customer experience, rather than deploying gadgetry for technology’s sake.  In 2012, he founded VoxPeritus to assist organizations in optimizing all channels connected with their contact centers.   www.voxperitus.com  Follow on Twitter: @CustExpGuru

Don’t force your IVR to do something it can’t do!

Routing is an important topic that drives the success or failure of speech-enabled applications, frequently more than the apps do themselves.

All IVR applications fall into one of four high-level functional groups: authentication (I am
this person); information request (what’s my checking balance; where is my package?); action (change password; refill prescription); and caller intent (I need to speak with a specialist about a block stock trade; I am calling about billing questions).

Many will agree that caller intent presents the most challenges with user interfaces. Accurately detecting caller intent is important for steering callers to the correct IVR application and/or to the appropriate employee skill. All too often in our consulting efforts, we find that a multitude of customer service representative (CSR) skills drives complexity, which can counterintuitively lower service performance. This is because the more alternatives that are presented to callers, the more likely they will be confused and routed to an incorrect path in the IVR or out to an agent. For the most part, such operational complexity is manageable within customer care.

Unfortunately, most customer service executives do not have complete control of their company’s voice channel. Marketing groups frequently drive telephony decisions, and though marketing ought to be very aware of the effect customer experience has on brand value, they are quite often far removed from understanding customers’ real-world experiences with their company. As a result, we often encounter many phone numbers created by marketing to track marketing efforts. What the marketing people don’t think through is that in their internal focus, they are ignoring the complexity they are creating for customers, customer care, and the poor telecommunications team.

The result is misrouting of callers, causing high internal transfer rates and routing into incorrect IVR applications. Transfers negatively affect companies in multiple ways. Cost of labor increases through the lost productivity of the first employee, and during warm transfers, the cost of one employee speaking with a second employee. Telecommunication costs, including the cost of telephony platform resources, rise due to a greater number of dual paths and increased average handle time (AHT). Employee morale in contact centers with high transfer rates is markedly lower than in those that accurately route callers. Finally, customers especially do not like transfers. Several recent surveys have more than 20 percent of customers ranking transfers as their top dissatisfaction while interacting with call centers.

One company we studied implemented three new speech-enabled IVR applications in 2013. Net Promoter Scores and customer satisfaction scores were as high and, in one app, higher than calls handled by CSRs when callers were accurately routed into the correct IVR application. After misroutes into those applications, both scores dropped dramatically lower than CSR scores. Excellent IVR applications were providing very low satisfaction through misrouting. The focus for 2014 was on improving routing through retirement of 98 percent of toll-free numbers (TFNs), consolidation of CSR skills by 20 percent, and introduction of advanced speech-enabled natural language understanding routing out front on every call. The results confirm that with routing improvements, customer satisfaction with the IVR applications increased dramatically.

To reduce misroutes, your goals should include the following:

• An architecture that places IVR in front of the ACD

• No network prompting in front of the IVR

• Reducing TFNs to very few. Justifiable reasons for an additional TFN are different brands and languages other than English and not much more than that

• Reducing skills to achievable, cost-justifiable numbers. My personal “get worried” point is five skills

• Getting customers to the right place, at the right time, with the least effort will result in lower costs, higher customer and employee satisfaction, and improvement of critical contact center metrics such as AHT, average speed of answer, and first call resolution

Everyone wins when you get routing right. Your employees will love you and your customers will love your IVR.

A topic frequently discussed in Customer Experience (CX) circles is whether emotion is given enough significance in assessing current state and designing future state experiences.

Dependent on the situation, it seems that either emotion or data is given a preponderance of importance.  There are a myriad of reasons for out of balance CX assessments and designs.  Drivers for out of balance approaches include, but are not limited to: CX professionals’ personalities, clients’ personalities,  clients’ industries, channels addressed, and other factors.

The reality is that to properly address customer experience in contact centers, a balanced approach will produce the best outcome. VoxPeritus uses a two phased approach that first analyzes current state by “walking in a customer’s shoes.” This includes understanding who is calling and why. Of course, having good data about call types and caller information helps speed this portion of the assessment. Lacking clear data, a sampling of calls either recorded or monitored live in side by side monitoring sessions with CSRs can provide a a reasonably accurate perspective into the “who and why” of the majority of callers.

Understanding callers’ mental states helps us place ourselves in a better position to understand why certain activities could anger some customers while others ignore the offending issue.  For example, a frequent complaint we hear from callers who feel that they have been ignored by a company, is that not knowing how long to expect that they will be on hold in a call queue is something that especially angers them. For those who do not feel as though they were being ignored, long call queues without an estimated wait time are reported as a negative experience, but nowhere to the degree of those who feel ignored prior to their call.

Conversely, caller experiences can also affect callers’ states of mind. Poorly tuned and infrequently monitored IVR routing applications can offset a friendly, very helpful agent to the point of leaving the customer with a poor opinion of the company.

Today I had to make four calls to finally reach an agent with Chase Mortgage. Their IVR did not recognize touch tone input on my second call (the first direct extension call went to voicemail), the third call was transferred via their telco and was immediately dropped at the destination call center.  On the fourth try, I made it through to an agent who was quite professional and very helpful. However, the amount of customer effort that Chase requires to get to an agent is a sign of disrespect for their customers.  And this was two weeks after I informed them of the same problems and asked that it be escalated to their direct management for escalations to their IT group.

Attempting to address caller experience on emotional state alone would be short-sighted. It is impossible to accurately judge the emotional state of every caller, the best that can be done is to group callers into a few potential emotional states and attempt to eliminate the negatives and enhance the positives wherever possible.  Using data to analyze callers’ behavior provides another large piece of the puzzle.

Until very recently, the problem was that capturing data on end to end calls, including IVR activity was nearly impossible, and if available, it was very expensive and the solutions were problematic because they used IVR logs and frequently broke. So we resorted to telco, ACD and IVR reports in an attempt to stitch together an accurate picture.

The good news is that with the advent of advanced speech analytics and other voice channel technologies, gathering valuable data for end to end caller experience is becoming much easier, faster and more cost effective.  Data, coupled with audio recordings allow VoxPeritus to accurately track caller activities, while also providing a glimpse into callers’ emotional states or at minimum,  their verbal reactions to prompting and menus.

VoxPeritus uses advanced solutions from our partner Cyara that provides analysis through the entire voice channel, including IVR interactions. During the second phase, we initially set aside our subjective findings including caller emotion. We then focus on what the Cyara data tells us.

Cyara’s solutions allows us to choose a prompt and then analyze caller activity across hundreds of utterances in a single morning.  Furthermore, we can easily listen to the utterances, thereby weaving the emotional connection into the analytical approach.  It is at this point where we sometimes make discoveries that would be highly unlikely to be found through random sampling hundreds of calls across many days.  Combining data to drive our focus to transactions where callers do not interact with the IVR as expected, coupled with the ability to quickly and easily listen to utterances provides insights that improve caller experience while driving high ROIs.

In our last post, we discussed why companies should first fix their
current channels before rushing into providing customer service via social media. Internet sites have been up for over fifteen years for most companies, yet even the best sites are not integrated with the company’s voice channel, thereby increasing customer effort to receive service that the site could not provide.

1. Attempt to self serve on the website, and fail for any number of reasons

2. Call company support (and aren’t many companies sneaky about making it difficult to find their phone number?)

3. Drop into an IVR that asks you to re-authenticate even though you authenticated on the website, then asks you to listen to a menu of reasons of why you are calling

4. Eventually drop out to hopefully the correctly skilled customer service representative who asks you for the information you supplied to the website and then again to the IVR

So I almost always ask myself, “Why use the website? I should just call in next time.”  Then I remember, “Oh yeah, their IVR is so horrendous, I’ll do anything to stay out of it.”

I have been very vocal about companies not addressing this problem for many years.  Mostly the responses I receive are:
“too expensive” and “too complex.”

Now there is no excuse!

Fonolo provides an extremely easy Web Rescue solution that deploys in days and doesn’t require a massive IT project.  And this hosted solution is so cost effective, even small businesses are deploying it. A new, simplified pricing plan to be announced very soon. We will post it here.

Customers requiring help click on a button appropriately labeled to speak with your support representatives. Typically the most the widget will request the customer to complete is name and phone number.  Dependent on where the customer is on the website, different customer service skills can be targeted; e.g., billing vs. technical support.

Fonolo makes an inbound call to the call center, silently navigates the IVR on behalf of the customer, then waits on hold.
So it looks like a regular inbound call to the call center. When the customer service representative answers, Fonolo calls the customer, bridges the two calls, so when the customer answers, there is already a fully informed customer service representative, ready to assist. No IVR menu pain, no re-authenticating and then being prompted for the same information
yet again.  And no expensive, complicated multi-vendor integration.

As a customer who is sick and tired of dealing with these ridiculous scenarios, I say:
“So enough with the excuses, just fix it!”

Web Rescue

Enable customers to seamlessly transition from web to live assistance. Offer them a call-back and let them fast-track the IVR with just one click.

Connects Easily: With just a few lines of code, add a widget to your website that allows customers to request a call-back.

Works with Your IVR: Automatically navigate callers through the IVR based on their web context. No need to install additional hardware or software.

Empowers Agents: Pass customer information from web sessions to your agents and improve their efficiency.

Success Story: Optus – My Australian mobile carrier, great service!

Companies who have either deployed mobile applications, or are planning to,  need to think about integrating their voice channel with their mobile self service apps.

Fonolo’s Mobile Rescue solution works like their Web Rescue solution, and takes the pain out of customers contacting your customer support and then trying to look at their mobile app while providing IVR authentication such as account numbers.  The solution makes a seamless call carrying relevant information to inform your customer support staff of who the customer is, where they were in the mobile app when they decided to call, and can also provide relevant transaction details.

Who wouldn’t continue to use your mobile app when it’s so easy to get voice support when you really need it?

I have a few really great mobile apps (Vanguard Mutual Funds, Southwest Airlines) and quite a few really poor apps. What they have in common is that not a single company provides mobile app integration with their voice channel.  With Fonolo’s simplicity, speed to deliver, and unbelievably reasonable cost, there simply are no excuses not to offer it to your customers!

Mobile Rescue

Let customers easily connect to a live agent, directly from within your mobile app. With one tap on their smartphone they can request a call-back and avoid hold time.

Easy to Use: Give mobile customers a simple and intuitive way to request a call-back
from a live agent. 

Works with any App: Offer customers live assistance from within any mobile application on any platform.

Connects to Your IVR: Automatically navigate callers through the IVR. No need to install any additional hardware or software.

Success Story: 1st United Services Credit Union – Credit unions are customer owned, and customer focused

Think your company is customer focused and modern because you offer a mobile app?  Sounds much like the first days of being on the Internet, and we’ve all seen that just is not good enough. “So enough with the excuses, just fix it!”
The direction is clear, the time is now!

Image originally posted on Zengage, The Zendesk Blog

It seems that everywhere I turn these days, Customer Experience professionals are touting something “NEW!”  Yet as I read their perspectives in blogs, social media websites like LinkedIn or as teasers to webinars, I find myself scratching my head and wondering what is truly new?

Social Media
Let me get the one point out of the way that arguably could be considered new, but truly isn’t:
(Said in a breathless manner) “social media!”  Sure enough, ten years ago there was no Twitter nor Facebook.

But there were chats, emails and bulletin boards.

Any service delivery organization that is concerned that many customers are posting about their service on Twitter, Facebook, etc., has a problem.  And they’ve likely had the problem for a long time.  Customers use social media to rant about poor service and frequently, the deaf ears their complaints fall on in those organizations.  Those delivery organizations should let their marketing teams gather that information and compile the statistics for them, but more importantly they should quit hyperventilating about needing to jump into providing customer service via social media and instead take a new look at themselves and fix what’s been wrong about their service delivery model that is causing these complaints to be made in the public realm.  And it would be a perfect time to make it very easy for customers to provide feedback directly to your organization.

So what’s changed?  Not a lot.

Customers can, and do post about poor service to their Twitter followers.  OK, the new bit here is that Tweeters can use a hash-tag to mention the company’s name in the hopes that their post will be seen by others who are experiencing poor service from the same organization; e.g., #chase.  Other than that, it’s the same thing that many did back in the late 90’s when we couldn’t get anyone’s attention in a company via phone calls. We sent an email to a senior executive and copied in loads of people that we knew and some that we didn’t, but we had their email address.  Basically it was Twitter of 1998 but even more effective since we almost always got to the CEO’s admin assistant who immediately escalated “from the CEO down.”

Back then instead of posting rants about service on Facebook, we could post about our displeasure on an Internet bulletin board/forum site and there was a pretty good chance that we would hear back from the company. One personal example of this was back in 2001 when I had some concerns about a Polk Audio subwoofer. I called the company and got a fairly high level response from a customer service representative that didn’t help me. I posted my concerns (hardly a complaint) with a request for any insights on how to fix my small problem on the Audio Visual Science forum. The owner of Polk Audio, Matthew Polk replied the same day, offering to call me direct to help me tune the speaker exactly how it should have been tuned.
Great Scott! Take that Mark Zuckerberg! My concern wasn’t mixed in with feed of incoherent Facebook rants that typically don’t include enough relevant information to successfully act upon. I was asking for assistance from fellow audiophiles who demand a reasonable amount of details about a problem or they publicly shame you.

Why organizations should not jump into social media service before they are prepared
Before you make a single move regarding providing customer service via social media, first consider the following points:

• How well are you handling email and chat today?

• Do you automatically log each email and chat as a CRM or Service Management case?

• Do you automatically monitor the turnaround time for a real answer, not an automated “we got it” reply, and if so, what percentage fall within your stated response time goal?

• For chat, what is your abandonment rate? Do you even monitor chat abandonment?

• What is your customer satisfaction rate for providing service via chat and email?

• Do you make it easy for customers to complain when they are not happy with service?

Unless you are doing an excellent job today with email and chat, why would you think that your organization can provide adequate service levels with their social media equivalents of Facebook and Twitter?  And where your failure to provide good service is now in front and center for the entire world to see.

Instead of allocating time and resources on attempting to provide service through social media, focus instead on business basics and what is causing customers to rant about your service on social media in the first place.  If you improve your service via existing channels, including providing a means to easily escalate service complaints through existing channels, you might surprise your Marketing team with a swift reduction of complaints in the digital public commons.

Mobile Caller Experience
The development of the mobile cellular service phone will be celebrating its fortieth anniversary this year, with the first commercially available phone from Motorola reaching the market thirty years ago in 1983.

In the late 80’s I called American Express while mobile and asked the agent to check on something for me off line, and call me back when she had the answer.  Given the cost of mobile calls then, Amex allowed it. Great service, but offering call backs instead of a hold queue is rarely offered today.

I owned a Smartphone back in 2003, accessing my accounts and making purchases via mobile web which sometimes prompted me to call those companies when something couldn’t be answered on their Internet site.  And many were doing the same thing five years earlier while buying or checking service on the Internet but calling from a land-line.

So truly, what’s new?  OK, many more non-geeks are accessing the Internet via Smartphones, and  the cost of airtime is so low that companies could care less if you are on hold via mobile or at work\home on a land-line.  What is new are higher mobile Internet volumes but other than continuing growth, there is not much new in the time that organizations should have already addressed these channel issues.  While many customers are still accessing the Internet while perched in front of their laptop or desktop and calling via land-line while in a transaction or post transaction, and still waiting for contact centers to integrate their websites with their voice channel.

Here is an example of a typical caller experience regardless of calling from a Smartphone after interacting with an app, or from a land-line while interacting with a website where you have authenticated yourself and made clear why you are interacting with the organization. The call is answered by an IVR where you have to re-declare your intent for calling, then re-authenticate yourself, whereby you frequently hear the familiar two DTMF tones indicating a Take Back and Transfer to another site, where you are placed in a queue with everyone else who didn’t try self-service to hold for an indeterminate time.  (We call that the “bad customer for trying self-service” hold time.) But wait, once you are transferred out, the agent asks you to re-authenticate yet a third time, with the same information you already supplied again the second time in the IVR!

Gee, that’s not new is it?  We Internet using consumers have been getting this poor level of service since the mid-nineties and if you take the Internet data available out of the scenario, dropping data between IVR and agents has been going on for at least twenty five years.

Why have organizations not yet addressed these known customer experience problems?
This is a constant question raised in the Customer Experience professional community. The answers can be summarized as follows:

• Ignorance

  • Organizations (clearly their management) do not consider Customer Experience to be a priority and do not recognize the Return On Investment from improving it.

• Technical inexperience

  • All too often, we hear that a solution to any one of the issues raised here is too expensive.  When in fact, there are simple, low cost means to correct these issues. Too often, organizations rely on their internal IT teams who are focused on running and maintaining their current infrastructure, or their vendors, who are focused on selling their wares which likely are not inexpensive. They need to ask for outside, third party assistance to get around these barriers to success.

• Business chaos

  • Mergers and acquisitions, constant changes in executive management and/or reorganizations all pull focus from fixing what smart managers know are problems.

Summary
You should be thinking about social media and mobile caller experience, but thinking about them in terms of what your voice, email and chat channel current states are for customer interactions.  If you are not managing cross channel interactions well today, then you are going to make a real mess of managing yet another non-real time channel with the addition of social media.  And you don’t control the delivery method/channel, so recognize that you may have new complaints regarding poor delivery by Twitter, Facebook or other social media sites.

Furthermore, if your company has a web presence that your customers access today, are you providing Click to Call functionality?  If not, then you’re going to feel even more pressure from mobile Internet customers once your organization provides mobile apps or mobile web presence.  Nothing new here, but more pressure for the same expected functionality.

If you have long queue times at certain time periods (or worse, regularly), then you probably are hearing about it today from your customers.  Have you thought about a call back feature for your current Internet, and land-line and mobile voice channel customers?  If you answered yes but found it too expensive, then perhaps there is something fairly new in telephony functionality that we will soon cover in a post here that is fairly new and not something old and hyped as new. One of VoxPeritus’ partners can help you and we will invite them to provide their solution in our next post.  To our delight, they are not hyping all of the challenges mentioned here as new, just their approach to helping you inexpensively solve them using your current telephony, instead of requiring complex and expense new infrastructure.

Think about those hyping mobile and social media as completely new channels with new challenges never before felt.  Then consider the points stated here about what these trends require for good customer experience.  Do you really want to trust your business to someone hyping fairly old and known problems as new issues? The VoxPeritus team believes that none of us should trust our business to anyone using hype to get our attention.  Experience trumps hype for good results.

Given our experience performing many caller experience audits, it is quite likely that your current voice channel customer experience is probably not great, and quite possibly could be less than good.  You should prioritize getting your house in order for your largest and still the top customer demanded channel. Nothing new there, except perhaps your renewed interest in doing the right thing for your customers, while defending your organization’s brand value.  Consider contacting VoxPeritus for a free caller experience audit of the top level of your main voice channel to understand the state of your organization’s caller experience.

Don’t fall prey to “social media is killing the phone” hype.  Consider the information provided in the following Infographic.  This is just one of many studies all saying that voice is still King and will remain so through the end of this decade. When you have your voice channel in order, including mobile caller experience, then perhaps you might want to begin to schedule time to address your email and chat channels before you consider taking on social media as yet another channel to manage well.

Kevin Brown
Managing Director

Robert Bacal, noted Customer Service expert and author aligns with our perspective in his latest article: Eight Reasons Why Social Media Negatively Affects Customer Service and The Customer Experience

Image originally posted on Zengage, The Zendesk Blog

One of the metrics we capture and report on for our clients is the first thing a caller hears (or doesn’t) when they initially contact our client’s organization via phone. We give a very small positive measure if the client answers the call, and a large negative if they don’t. It is an expectation that every call to an organization should be answered, so the fact that your organization answers your phones is a small positive. If your organization doesn’t answer your phones, then your callers’ experiences are poor, and our caller experience metrics reflect that.

Many people have asked me if we truly experience a no answer state. My answer has been that it personally happens to me as a consumer once or twice per year, but I couldn’t ever remember a name of an organization that failed to answer my call. Two weeks ago, I received an email for a medical product that interested me, so I called the company for more information regarding insurance status. It was late afternoon Pacific time and early evening on the east coast where I later discovered their call center is located. I received a “Ring On No Answer” (RONA), so I hung up, rechecked the phone number and called again. Another RONA.

I called the company over a week later, and informed them of the RONA. I ended up speaking to a manager who was quite surprised because she said they had an after-hours message with the call center’s sales hours. They use a different number for their 24 x 7 support operations. She called me back several hours later to thank me for calling back because they discovered that Time of Day settings for hours of operation had been changed and something went amiss. Obviously nobody bothered to test the message after making changes on the ACD (root cause) and they do not use a continuous monitoring service, and apparently no customers informed them of the after hours RONA.

Since this was a sales center, there was a potential for negative revenue effect. I informed the manager how to request time of day caller reports from their carrier and dependent on their carrier, retrial reports to show callers who called after hours but never called back from the same phone number.

Think about your organizations’ various customer touch points. Where do your customers interact with your organization? If you have “brick and mortar” storefronts, they need to stay fresh and current; someone reviews those locations daily (local staff and management) and they likely are formally reviewed on a scheduled basis by management, as well as by a facilities team. If you have an Internet presence, resources are allocated to test your site(s) and keep them updated. Now compare your voice channel and honestly answer if your organization provides an equal amount of skilled resources and associated tools to ensure that it is treated with the same care and respect as your other touch-points.

The first step toward protecting your voice channel is to continuously monitor it for caller experience. Our partner Cyara provides state of the art testing and monitoring services, we love them because an externally hosted service is the easiest and fastest to implement and in many cases, the most cost effective solution.  Their Pulse service calls in at times that you define and takes the path callers’ use.  By calling in every 15 minutes as an example, you’re only 14 minutes away at the worst case of discovering something that has gone wrong. Yes, there is room for premise based testing and Cyara has that covered too.

And remember, don’t rely on your customers (or me) calling your toll free number 24 x 7 and reporting back to you when something isn’t working right. Pick up the phone and call Cyara instead.
USA: +1 415-946-8861
EMEA:  +44 20 7256 4170
HQ: +61 3 9093 0815 

IVR plays an important role in caller experience, but is just one segment of call treatments. Furthermore, the focus of the article was to prompt organizations to engage top quality VUI designers, rather than continue down their current path of “patching and fixing bit by bit.” The publication’s focus on speech recognition did not permit discussing total caller experience, and why VUI designers are just one of many important facets of improving caller experience.

We will follow up here to discuss the bigger picture over the coming months. So stop back to discuss the many points that need to be considered to consistently deliver a good caller experience, in order to protect brand value.

When organizations consider outsourcing their IVR, most of them review their existing applications to seek opportunities for improvement. However, this activity is much like spring-cleaning in your house: When you are finished, you feel good but you still have the same home with which you started.

With additions and major renovations over the years, this is the house that now resembles something a 7-year-old child might build out of Lego bricks. For starters, you have the “really useful” addition to the back of the house designed by your eccentric uncle (the IT telephony manager who stuck around for less than a year) and the various “travel rooms” featuring different languages that do not match the rest of the house.

Don’t forget the confusing and unfriendly foyer, where all guests hate having you force them through it. Shouldn’t they feel grateful that you have added to the house, to the point where they should quit asking to come in through the less formal side door? Why do some of them listen to that annoying man who posted a map on the Internet that shows people how to get inside your house without going through your elaborate foyer?

Perhaps outsourcing your IVR should be more like building a new well-designed home, rather than a daylong spring-cleaning of your house. If you agree with that hypothesis, then to whom should you turn for help in determining what your real requirements are? And who will help you sketch out a high-level perspective of your new home?

Voice user interface (VUI) designers are excellent resources to help you define your true requirements. Why call them “true requirements”? Well, requirements come in many forms; if you are building a new home, you want to ensure that you are fulfilling your current requirements, as opposed to imagined or outdated ones. Bruce Balentine, of Enterprise Integration Group (EIG), uses the term “never asked question”: “What problem are we solving, and how important is it to solve it?” Moreover, you want to ensure that your house is welcoming and has a good flow throughout.

The responsibilities of VUI designers require understanding the problem the IVR will solve, from both the caller’s perspective and the goal of the owner of the IVR application. Furthermore, designers must maintain a consistent theme across multiple applications in an IVR (think decor in your house).

Customer experience designers and interaction designers are similar to VUI designers, but they all don’t play identical roles. The speech technology industry isn’t as well defined as others, hence the confusion over small degrees of difference. Given that the discussion centers on speech-enabled applications, a VUI designer is the correct choice for these activities.

If you believe you own a house that is already in good order—meaning it would not require many changes before you outsource your applications—you might consider having a VUI designer perform an audit to provide an external perspective. By doing so, you would quickly confirm whether your belief is correct. And the audit would clearly provide examples that you may have never heard before, unless you called into your IVR regularly as you made changes over time.

Seldom are speech-enabled applications in good shape before they are outsourced. So, to set the proper application budget expectations, do yourself and your organization a big favor. Don’t call a cleaning crew until you have thoroughly reviewed your existing applications with an experienced VUI team. A dust mop, pail, and broom would be better placed in the broom closet of your new, well-designed house that should serve you well for years to come.