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.

The Forgiving Consumer

  I was not going to write a post today but I noticed something that got me thinking about how forgiving customers can be.  First let me say that I am an Amazon.com junkie.  When you are a busy professional married to a busy professional, leisure time is rare and jealously guarded.  So when I can buy anything and everything (including diapers) from Amazon - get free shipping (Prime baby!) and know that they stand behind everything they sell with great service, then you get to know your UPS guy/gal pretty well.

  The other thing I love about Amazon are the product reviews.  I find them to be generally reliable and sometimes very entertaining too (see AutoExec Wheelmate).  Because I buy from them a lot (I can't overstate that) Amazon sends me emails several times a day.  They know that I have been shopping for a portable Bluetooth speaker for my office and so they sent me an email yesterday as part of their Marketplace deal-of-the-day, tailored just for me, the Oontz XL from Cambridge Audioworks.

  I began reading reviews and this review jumped out at me.

 
   Wow.  This customer (JerryD) gave Cambridge Soundworks three opportunities to satisfy him for one reason: they have him great customer service.  Not only does this review make me want to reward this company with my business but it reminds me that customers are not as fickle as we might think.  The 2013 Temkin Forgiveness Rating show that companies with stellar customer service can weather a mistake or bad experience better than 50% of the time.  USAA has always been a powerhouse of customer service and 60% of respondents stated that they would be willing to forgive a mistake by them.  Retailers also score well on this report with Amazon (no surprise here) scoring very high among their customers.  Some industries have a much more fickle customer base.  Television and Internet service providers have the least forgiving customer base.

  What seems clear from the Temkins report is that good or bad, the experience you create for your customer has a lasting effect.  Companies (and industries) that have a track record of good customer service tend to earn forgiveness from their customers while industries that have a reputation for bad customer service (remember waiting 6 hours for your cable installer to arrive?) are not likely to get a second chance.  In fairness to television and internet service providers, forgiveness is probably much more difficult in their market where jumping service providers is so easy.  But the retail customer base is even less captive and that industry ranks much better.

  As a consumer I want to like the company I buy from.  When I purchase their product I want to feel that I am appreciated for my business and if so, I will reward that company with more business, even at a slightly higher price.  As the Cambridge Audioworks review shows, consumers are willing to forgive some pretty grave mistakes if they believe the company is truly interested in making things right.

Multi-Channel CX Gets You In The Fight: A Word of Encouragement for Underdogs

In my inaugural blog post I wanted to write about a subject with which I am currently wrestling.

  How do small companies, upstarts, or those with less market share, compete with their larger rivals when it comes to the customer journey?

Since you cannot compete on price, brand recognition, media saturation, or anything else it would seem the only answer is to offer a better customer experience - one that is more personal (I'm excluding the other obvious answer of higher quality because without that what's the point?).  But what if you do not own the point of sale?  What if every direct customer interaction is with a distributor or big box retailer?  It takes an army of channel sales reps to reign in that beast, often with poor results (I say that as a former retail sales person who had constant interaction with channel managers).

  If a brand finds itself in this predicament the only option left to them are traditional channels (voice, email) and social channels.  But even with social channels, the big guy has the advantage because they have an army of enthusiasts who are more than willing to answer each and every question about your product - FOR FREE!

This is an opportunity for the underdog to leverage multi-channel CX technology and one that I think is overlooked.

  When we think about companies with great customer experiences we tend to gravitate to big logos who have spent years refining their image and experience.  Many of these big brands had the luxury of defining that experience prior to the emergence of technologies that level the playing field like Twitter and Facebook.  I know, I know - I just said that big brand evangelists are legion - this is true.  There is no silver bullet for the underdog.  The reason that multi-channel CX favors the underdog is that it costs less for them to deploy it, without the albatross of old, inflexible legacy systems weighing them down.  With cloud technology it is even faster and easier.  In a matter of weeks or months, the underdog can be directly engaged with their new customers and building that next generation of evangelists for themselves.

  One last thing that occurred to me as I debated this in my head (something I do a lot) is the cost of human capital associated with this strategy.  Let's face it, big brands take advantage of the fact that their crowd-sourced support strategy is nearly free.  The underdog has to carry the burden of a costly contact center to compete, right?  I suppose it depends on their culture.  As evidenced by last week's epic Twitter battle between T-Mobile and AT&T even CEOs are willing to login and join the fight.  With the flexibility of cloud-based multi-channel CX anyone can be an agent - anywhere.  CXOs can create a fun and rewarding culture by encouraging staff to check-in to a social queue for a couple of hours per day to respond to customer inquiries.  Bonuses or rewards like an extra day off might just be enough to get those employees who are already passionate about their product to share that passion via Twitter or Facebook.  That's one way for an underdog to kick start a multi-channel initiative.


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