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.

SMS: The Forgotten Channel or Ready for Rebirth?

  Everyone is writing about upcoming trends in the contact center for 2014.  There's nothing truly new but there is notable growth and increased interest in things like customer journey mapping (I really like Leisa Reichelt's description) and mobile self-service.  We continue to hear voice biometrics/authentication bandied about but outside of insurance and financial services, I have seen almost no adoption (which to me says more about our lack of imagination than it does the capabilities of the solution).

  Maybe what I am noticing is the gap between trendy solutions that analysts love to write about (remember Nina and Lexee) and practical solutions that customers actually use.  Voice is still by far the most dominant channel in the contact center but web self-service, virtual assistants, chat, social media, and email all have their place.  The reason these channels dominate is simple: there is no technical or experiential  barrier to their use.  Yes, most anyone could download a mobile virtual assistant, but when to use it?  I think most of us would still feel awkward using a mobile virtual assistant in public to do anything other than play a song in iTunes or set a quick reminder.  I personally cringe at the idea of speaking my credit card number or credentials into my phone in public.  I could do these things in the privacy of my home but then the convenience of speech is only marginally better than using my iPad.  For a customer contact solution to take hold it needs to be easy to access, available when the customer wants to use it, quick, and effective.

  I can think of one technology that fits these criteria, has been around for more than twenty years, and yet is still underutilized: SMS.

  In May of this year I participated in a roundtable for contact center managers and what I heard really surprised me.  Of all of the channels they were supporting or deploying, SMS was receiving the most interest from customers and many of them were planning to deploy it in 2014.

  Why had I not heard this before?  I started thinking about my own experiences with SMS as a support channel.  My power utility allows me to submit outage notifications via SMS (something I had to do this morning!).  My mobile carrier conducts satisfaction surveys via SMS.  Submitting the power outage could not have been easier (much faster than calling an IVR) and I completed the satisfaction survey over several hours when it was convenient for me to answer each question (I rarely have the time or patience for a telephone survey).  Some people still pay per SMS (my Dad hates it when I send him a text) but for many of us, it is the perfect channel for certain (obviously not all) types of support inquiries. 

  Here are just a few great uses of SMS:

• Order Confirmation
• Multi-Factor Authentication
• Trouble ticket creation
• Resolution notification
• Brief surveys
• Field Service Dispatch
• Field Service ticket updates / close-out

  If you are reading this and thinking, this is old news, then please ask yourself, why have we not seen wider adoption in the contact center - especially when customers seem to be asking for it?  Maybe it is precisely because it is not sexy or new and maybe there is doubt in the C-Suite about whether customers want or need another channel.  Or maybe it is because few CRMs or contact center platforms support it (I have worked on several of these deployments and they required some custom work but nowhere near the level of effort of a Natural Language application). Despite these challenges at least some of the leaders I have spoken with plan on adding SMS to the channels they support.

  There is a lot of life left in SMS and a lot of potential to serve customers quickly and conveniently.  Hopefully some creative CX designers will pick it up and bring us some new and exciting uses for this old, but hardly irrelevant, technology.

Cloud Contact Center? Overlook Telco At Your Own Peril.

    Generic statement of the year: everyone is moving to the cloud.  In my world that means the contact center.  Cloud makes life nice and easy.  No big footprint to manage, no big cash outlay, and fewer throats to choke.  With more and more cloud vendors offering to do everything soup to nuts, it is easy for decision makers to overlook some very important elements that are still in their control, like telco.

  This subject is near and dear to me because I have seen firsthand the impact of overlooking telco  (and I am including data bandwidth here too - SIP is still telco) in even small to medium-sized contact centers.  From busy signals and poor call quality to lost calls, companies that rely on their cloud provider to handle their telco without asking some serious questions put themselves at risk of jeopardizing the customer experience.

  Since I am by no means a subject matter expert on this topic, I reached out to one of our network engineers, John Pecora, for help answering my burning questions.  John has been with VoltDelta for almost 10 years and spent 14 years with Nortel Networks; much of his time spent delivering solutions to telephone carriers that demand extreme uptime and reliability.

Here are John's answers to my 5 burning questions on Cloud Contact Center telco:

DM:  What is the biggest misconception you see as it relates to cloud contact center technology and telephony engineering and design? 

JP:  I believe from a technical standpoint that the data and voice transport portion of the cloud solution is often misunderstood or assumed more reliable to some extent due to the virtualized nature of the solution. Cloud technology still has two parts to its reliability, one being the robustness of the cloud center transport and the other being the customers access to the cloud environment.  Although there are costs associated with more robust and reliable networks, it has to be weighed against the quality of the customer experience and its values to the business.

DM:  What telco considerations do you see are often overlooked in contact centers?

JP:  Some items that are frequently overlooked in contact centers are Telco Diversity, the ability for the telco to deliver an end-to-end solution with minimal hand-offs and the versatility and/or availability of specific call routing features to support the business.

DM:  When should a company choose SIP over TDM for their contact center and when does TDM make more sense?  Is there a threshold in terms of call volume or number of agents when one makes more sense than the other?

JP:  This is a big one; there are so many aspects to consider when choosing SIP over TDM and vise-versa.  With SIP being a data connection it is critical to have a properly provisioned and reliable network from end-to-end with the ability to maintain the quality of the call.  Although there may be a cost savings with SIP in larger volume contact centers, if you tend to be in an area with sparse IP connectivity, sometimes the tried and true public switched telephone network (PSTN) may be of value.  There are many more factors in this decision such as audio codec needed to support the calls which vary in bandwidth consumed by the call - reducing number of calls transmitted simultaneously with selected bandwidth, call features, SIP platform adherence to the SIP RFC, data and content security, SIP infrastructure additions such as session border controllers and their licensed features.  A sound cloud solution will offer both options to best accommodate their customer.

DM:  What factors contribute to poor call quality – on either SIP or TDM?

JP:  The biggest contributing factor to poor call quality on SIP calls is improper provisioning and/or configuration of the IP transport which lead to excessive jitter (variance in latency). To maintain call quality during a sip call the audio packets must either be prioritized with QOS (quality of service) configuration or provided enough bandwidth so that packets do not experience queuing delay. Typically straight TDM call quality is less troublesome due to the dedicated channel resources of PRI circuits. 

DM:  I often hear customers say they want to “bring their telco” while other companies would rather not bother with separate vendors for telco and contact center.  What are some of the factors people should consider when making the decision between owning their telco or not?

JP:  The biggest factor would be the efficiency of the call flow and limiting the number of times the call has to be moved around separate networks to complete the IVR/agent experience.  If choosing to have a cloud solution to maintain the telephony, one thing to consider would be your ability to manage call routing features, sometimes referred to as ICR or ECR (intelligent/interactive call routing or Enhanced call routing) for the calls as well as understanding the charges for those individual services whether they be per call charges or one time set up charges.  A good trunk overflow and DR configuration is also important to consider. 

Thanks to John Pecora for taking the time to help me with this subject.  Clearly there is a lot to consider when choosing a cloud contact center vendor.  Finding a team that is knowledgeable and experienced enough to guide you through complex telco design can mean the difference between getting a return on your cloud investment or being stuck with a poorly engineered solution.