My Prediction for 2015: All That Matters Is The Experience

My wife's company hosted a white elephant gift exchange during their holiday party and she came home with a portable power stick.  You know the kind that are everywhere. Every news stand in every airport sells them and now you can usually find them in the checkout aisle of your grocery store.  What product could be more commoditized than this little battery?  Can you name a single brand?  I love all gadgets so I took the trouble to unbox and charge it.  Inside I found a curious little piece of paper. 
I have been reading everyone's predictions for the Contact Center in 2015 full of the latest buzzwords and trendy tech.  I also went back and reviewed some of those same predictions for 2014.  Precious few became widespread trends.  In 2014 pundits were predicting the omnipresence of Customer Journey Mapping, Multi-Channel becoming seamless Cross-Channel, and every kind of analytics you can imagine; customer experience analytics, social analytics, speech analytics, etc.  Were these technologies adopted in 2014?  Certainly.  Were they widespread?  Not at all.

The economic downturn that began in 2008 made it feasible to throw bodies at call volume and do it with onshore representatives.  At the same time companies caught on to the fact that customer experience is a differentiator - and in an age when information is ubiquitous and scarcely do companies have a captive customer base, customer loyalty is golden!  This little piece of paper says it all.  Anker figured out that the easiest way to stand out gain loyalty was to focus on the customer and care about their experience. 

With customer experience being a major contributor to customer loyalty, even well established technologies like chat and virtual

assistants have lost their luster.  Why?  Both technologies (chat and virtual assistants) leverage an extensive knowledge base for scale and efficiency.  The reason an agent can handle multiple chat sessions while also taking voice calls is because they can fill the gaps with canned responses (that is ALL that virtual assistants do...with a patina of pleasantries overlaid to patronize and waste your time).  Savvy customers get this and are tired of canned answers - whether they be automated or read to them from a script.  We want HUMAN interactions.  Couple that with the fact that Cloud Contact Center technology makes it easy to stand up a sophisticated contact center (or a home-based virtual one) in weeks and the allure of great human-to-human interactions is hard to resist.

Human interactions also make upselling/cross-selling a reality.  My wireless provider peppered me with emails (that I deleted without reading) about changing my plan and saving money.  Later when I called in with a service issue, the representative took advantage of a good experience (they solved my issue quickly) and sold me on the new rate plan.  Even with the most advanced (and expensive) speech and/or sentiment analytics, this is tough for automation to do and most companies would only try it with relatively low-value calls. 

I am no Luddite.  I think all of these technologies have a role to play in a modern customer experience strategy.  What I found in 2014 was that many of the features that make their way into a requirements matrix are driven by industry analysts and consultants and not by the company.  In every opportunity I have pursued where the requirements looked like a list of the breakout sessions at Frost or IQPC, the solution that was ultimately implemented was somewhat vanilla and more dependent upon human representatives; cutting edge tech being pushed-off to some nebulous future "phase". 

Large contact centers are using analytics and smart automation but they are hiding it from the customer.  Silent IVR, WFM/WFO, and Performance Management products that aide in coaching and developing great representatives will be the big winners in 2015 because they drive performance improvements without burdening or annoying the customer leaving us humans to do what we do best: interact.

IVR Tuning: You Get What You Pay For

Ah, the dreaded tuning exercise.  Once the province of skilled professionals paid large sums to keep an IVR application performing and relevant, now in the hands of every business user with a cloud solution.  Raise your hand if you love tuning your IVR!  No one?  What about those fancy analytic tools you have that show you exactly where callers are abandoning the application?  Doesn't your reporting tool allow you to drill-down to individual calls and even listen to them?  Doesn't all that information make the tuning exercise easier?  More fun?

The truth is, people procrastinate or completely avoid work they do not enjoy (which is why I am writing this instead of preparing a slide deck).  Despite the powerful tools available to IVR administrators, poorly tuned applications, even ones with loops, dead-ends, and bad error handling, are easy to find.  There is a surreal clarity that comes from working in the customer experience field.  We tend to participate more with automation and are more keen at noticing errors and defects.  More typical users abandon much more quickly.  They rely on instinct much more than we do.  I think for the average customer, the minute they notice the IVR sounding like an IVR ("please listen carefully as these menu options have recently changed"), they start looking for the exit.  Their complaints about the automation tend to be less specific.  They will not tell the representative that there is an error on the third menu or that option 2 always takes you back to the beginning.  Instead they just "hate your automated system".  Now you know you have a problem.  You should have tuned your application sooner but there were five other projects that were more important, ones that you hated less.

This is an example of where the promise of cloud has let us down.  Your Vice President of Support bought the idea that IVR tuning was something that could be handled internally.  There is a great set of tools designed to identify problems and an easy design interface to make small changes. And without that line item for service and maintenance, the ROI looked even better.  One year later, after the rubber has met the road and the wheels have nearly fallen off, after the Service Director who recommended this system has moved-on to another job, no one remembers that self-management  was a big part of the justification for buying that cloud platform.  Time to call your vendor and buy some training so you can begin to get a handle on that participation rate.  Maybe in three months you can finally begin making those changes.

The cloud IVR space is saturated with companies promising ease-of-use and total self-management.  They have deceptively low setup fees (because all they are doing is creating a user account) and even templates to get you started.  If your needs are simple and your call volume is low then so is your risk.  Most of these vendors employ only a handful of Voice User Interface (VUI) designers and rarely have a Speech Scientist on staff.  They offer no one to turn to for regular tuning and do not have the expertise to diagnose performance problems.  Technology is important and a slick user interface makes for a very nice demo but they are no substitute for expertise, experience, and a culture of service.

The market is also proving this out.  As we see more and more consolidation these slick start-ups are being gobbled-up by the veterans who know how to support enterprise customers.  Multi-tenant is giving way to multi-instance (which is a nice way to say hosted) and executives are seeing that the improved customer experience of live agents dedicated to a specific channel (rather than elusive multi-tasking, multi-channel, super-agent) is preferable to the fuzzy ROI of self-management.

Large enterprise customers have always chosen vendors who stay engaged and provide application tuning support for their entire life cycle.  IVR tuning is an iterative process.  It never ends.  Reporting and analytics will alert you to when your application is falling below performance thresholds but only after it has begun to cost you money.  And unless you are skilled and experienced at tuning, you will be learning on the job, compounding your losses because the tuning exercise takes weeks or months when an expert could have done it in days.  Mid-market companies buy in to the idea that self-management is more affordable or is the only affordable option, when nothing could be further from the truth.