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.

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.