We’ve talked a bunch about how phone technologies, and IVR especially, can enable small businesses to create a big business voice. While this idea is no longer so novel, I did not realize its sensitivities until reading Digium’s blog post, “The 15 Commandments of IVR – Commandment #2 – ‘Thou Shalt Not Create Fake Mailboxes.’”

The lasting thought that I was left with after reading Digium’s blog is that creating a bigger voice is not always the right objective. What’s most important for businesses is to create the right sized voice, not just to supersize like a fast food joint.

The blog’s opening caught my attention, so take a quick glance at Allison Smith’s personal IVR experience:

About a year ago, I recorded an IVR for a small independent dry cleaning business – not really a Mom and Pop company; they were located in outlets across three States, and were doing very well – they prided themselves on fitting in seamlessly into the communities they served and they were at just the right size for their comfort level. When I recorded their system, a request for a total re-record came in (never a good thing) but their reason for the redo was unique and sticks with me to this day: my usual professional tone was seen as too “highbrow” for them. Created too much of a “big company” impression. They didn’t want to be “Martinizing”; they wanted to sound “local”….friendly….and accessible.

Allison continues by providing some basic tips in constructing an IVR menu, but her main point is that IVR menus should be simple and should only feature mailboxes that are actually assigned. The common mistake of adding multiple mailboxes to route to one single person, in an attempt to give a “big business” impression, could lead to mailboxes being overlooked or deleted as spam. Even in the best case scenario, where the intelligent routing process remains flawless, extra lengthly IVR menus can confuse potential customers, or simply waste the listener’s time.

IVR’s ability to project a more professional image does not mean that you need to compromise on warmth or endlessly extend the number of mailbox choices. The first step in creating your IVR menu entails self awareness of what impression you would like to portray to your customers.

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When you hear the word IVR what comes to mind?

I would imagine (although feel free to correct me in the comments if you disagree) that when most marketers and advertisers hear the word IVR, the concept of automated phone systems comes to mind. Just take a look at Ifbyphone’s recent blog post “4 Creative IVR Applications,” or recent advertising campaigns such as Budweiser’s “Bud Babe IVR Call” Campaign for the World Cup, and you’ll see a different side of IVR technology.

Ifbyphone’s blog highlights 4 different campaigns that will help you think out of the box about ways to use IVR technology in advertising, not just in your business phone system. The Washington Capitals website, for example, lets fans create a video using a personalized headshot, or even record a message over the phone to share with friends. The IVR technology behind the campaign comes from Ifbyphone, a cloud telephony provider.

Head over to our IVR category to learn more about creative ways to use IVR in your advertising and marketing campaigns.

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Who will survive this week’s Dancing with the Stars elimination? The tension builds up between the premier show on Monday nights and the Results show on Tuesday night. What’s the bridge that keeps the addiction going during this 24 hour period between May 4 and May 5? Voting.

Did you miss the episode this week? Watch the YouTube clip below, and pay attention to the host’s ability to capture the crowd’s excitement just as the judges announce their votes for Pamela Anderson and Damian Whitewood. Normally, when viewers hear scores, a sense of joy, relief or disappointment sets in, and just at this very moment the host captures the audience’s power to make a difference – “remember to vote” you hear, as the phone number pops up across your TV screen.

With the exception of the die-hard Dancing with the Stars fans, once viewers leave the Television screen, their engagement level drops dramatically, as does the chance of them casting a vote. This is the logic behind vote-by-phone marketing campaigns – pull in your audience at the peak of their attention span, while in the heat of the moment. ABC’s voting hours reflect this idea in their voting hours. The phone polls are open only 30 minutes beyond the Dancing with the Stars showtime on Monday night, with extended online voting hours available for viewers who are still engaged in reading about the show’s gossip online the next morning.

OK, so your SMB might not have yet attracted the attention of the Dancing with the Stars elimination on May 4th. You can use the power of voting by phone in a simple phone marketing plan. Check out some concrete examples of ways to engage your customers by phone in our Archives, or more specifically in our posts on Ifbyphone’s VoteByPhone and 13th’s Street interactive use of IVR technology in their film Last Call.

Did you vote in this week’s Dancing with the Stars? How did it affect your engagement in the show and anticipation of the Tuesday results?

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2. Marketing Tip: Ask Your Developers about Telephony APIs

Whether you’re standing behind a ticket counter for a NBA playoff game, sitting at a reception desk, or in your office on the phone, you will be a lot happier in your job if your waiting customers are also happy. If you can’t change the length of the line, then how do you keep your customers happy?

Here’s a few tips on how to use phone technology to keep your customers happy – yes – even while waiting in line!

• Use call routing and automated phone systems to route your customer to the right person. In response to the constant frustration of customers waiting in line, Andrew Goldman for Gaebler Ventures expands on the need to keep non-servicing employees out of the customer’s viewpoint in gaebler.com’s Resources for Entrepreneurs. Even if valid reasons prevent the other employees from helping out with the customer service queue, the customer may not realize this and the extra employees project an inefficient image to the customer. Just think about the last time that your call was routed in circles through an IVR system, including several times of waiting on hold for the next representative, who as it turns out belonged to the wrong department. Asking customers the right questions to intelligently route their call projects an efficient company image and keeps the customers happy.
• Set up a voice broadcast. I was recently trying to write some posts while on vacation. I opened up my computer and noticed that the Internet was down. How annoying! I then spent almost an hour trying to figure out the source of the problem, only to find out at the end that the issue stemmed from an outage in the area, having nothing to do with my personal router. If only the company had used a voice broadcasting system to notify me that the Internet was down due to an area outage, and that the company was working on fixing the issue. I would have been a much happier customer with an extra hour of vacation and one less hour of frustration!
• Use mobile technology to manage customer expectations. Waiting in line is frustrating enough in its own right, but the anger only builds up when you start imaging all of the things that you could be doing in the meantime. ReadyPing and other new mobile technology services, enable restaurants, hair salons, auto services, hotels, medical offices, etc, to manage their waiting customers by sending them a simple text message when their turn arrives. Instead of waiting outside or in the lobby of crowded restaurants, you can walk around the area and come back when your table is all ready.

The list does not end here… Do you have more tips for ways to use phone systems or mobile technology to keep customers happy? Continue the list by sharing your comments below!

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As a marketing agency, the idea that not all leads are created equal, and your need to qualify them into different levels is a central tenant of your marketing plan. If you’re looking for tips on how to qualify a good lead, check out great lists for characteristics of and techniques for finding good quality leads in the article Qualifying Sales Prospects on AllBusiness.com. Now that you know the basics of what you’re looking for, it’s time to think out-of-the-box for new ways to qualify leads.

Ifbyphone’s Hosted IVR offers a creative new solution to increase and qualify your leads. Here’s a flow chart of how it works, followed by an explanation in plain and simple English:

Now, for the verbal learners, here’s an explanation of how you can use Ifbyphone’s hosted IVR for lead generation. In a list of 7 Essential Phone Applications for Lead Generation Companies on Ifbyphone’s blog, number three writes the following:

3. IVR – Interactive Voice Response
Use Hosted IVR technology to prequalify leads that call in over the phone. When a prospect calls the number, ask a series of automated questions. Assign a score to each answer. If the prospect is a high quality lead, automatically pass the call along to your client. If not, automatically route the call to voicemail and deal with it later. Feel free to A/B test messaging and make updates at any time.

Let’s take an example from today’s news to make this method hit home. The airlines have been inundated with phone calls since Thursday and must qualify the different sources of their leads. By using hosted IVR, the airlines can intelligently route the customers to the proper locations, and distribute the information about flight updates to and from Europe as quickly as possible. When prospects calling into the system wants to receive automated updates about the most recent test flights, they can listen to an updated recording. When customers requires more specific attention, the IVR system can route them to the appropriate recording, question or agent.

So how will this information help the airlines in their lead qualification?

Especially in times of incredibly high traffic volume, the ability track and report all calls that come into the company, from their original source, through the IVR branches, all the way to their destination, will provide the company with critical future information. When a customer who was stuck in an airport for 5 days calls into the airline system in 2 weeks to book a new flight, this customer history provides important information for how the airline should qualify and route the lead. Flexible platforms for hosted IVR, such as Ifbyphone enable businesses to increase and track leads in all situations- from the slowest seasonal times, to times of intense environmental blows such as today’s ash cloud over Europe.

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After reading the article: “Finding Out Whether IVR Solutions will Harm Your Customer Relations,” I decided to investigate. In my further Internet surfing, I recalled the article from CRMToDay: “It’s True: Your Customer Can Love Your IVR (or least be good friends).” From the titles alone these two articles seem contradictory. Yet to my mind, they just present two sides of the same coin. The two articles highlight the classic question, “Is your glass half full or half empty?” In marketing specifically, and in business in general, this is not a bad approach to take. Looking at one question from two different angles can help articulate and nuance the issues involved.

Let’s analyze the question of how IVR can impact your customer relations.

The key reasons that the first article highlights in describing how IVR can harm your customer relations include:

• A lack of awareness for why your customers are returning, or why they are approaching your business in the first place.
• The inability for paying customers to speak directly with company representatives.
• The customer’s feeling of neglect due to a lack of individual response.
• Giving the customer a feeling that the company has no strategy for customer relations.

If these dangers of harming customer relations from IVR are so strong, then why does the second article claim that your customers may love you BECAUSE of your IVR?

The beginning premise is the same. As companies become more and more complex, businesses struggle to maintain the personal connection with all of their customers. At this stage, many companies turn to automation as a solution to provide their customers their needs more efficiently, albeit through less personal means. When the IVR system fails to meet the customer’s expectations is when the harm begins.

So what’s the key to getting your customers to love your IVR?

The key to IVR success is to measure how customers use the system, and to align these usage patterns with the business objectives for the system. This information can be used to continuously modify and evolve the IVR system to maximize cost savings, revenue and customer satisfaction.

Is this goal easier said than done? What are the steps that a phone marketing system should take to maximize the customer satisfaction level of an IVR system?

When designing your IVR system, businesses and call centers should take 3 main factors into account:

• Business Objectives: A business objective is what the organization wants to accomplish via the IVR system and must be articulated as a user outcome.
• User objectives: User objectives are what the customers hope to accomplish via the IVR system. These may overlap with the business objectives, but often the user has goals that the IVR designers did not take into account, or chose not to put into the IVR system for business reasons.
• Business environment dynamics: Business environment factors include the competition, market conditions and awareness of market desires.

Although analyzing your company’s internal IVR goals may seem reasonable, how should you methodically discover the user behavior and experience of your customers? The article continues by outlining 4 steps to a successful IVR:

1. Measure user behavior
2. Analyze user behavior measurements
3. Decide on change
4. Implement changes

In summary, these two perspectives emphasize one central point. In order to maintain a successful IVR system, you must understand its impact on your customer relations. If you methodically design your IVR system with the user behavior and key customer needs in mind, then it should serve to increase your customer satisfaction, and make your glass of milk half full.

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How many customers are you trying to please at once?

The question of your target audience and how to satisfy that audience challenges product based and service based companies alike. On one end of the spectrum stand companies that attempt to market how all customers how they can benefit from one all-purpose solution. On the other end stand companies that emphasize their ability to provide a tailored solution for every customer’s individual needs. While the first approach, taken to the extreme, faces the risk of “jack of all trades master of none,” the second approach can be unrealistic, expensive or slow to execute.

Now let’s think about this dilemma from the customer’s perspective. Out-of-the-box solutions may not match your exact needs, especially if your company is constantly adapting or growing. But for small businesses, customized solutions seem limited to enterprise budgets.

What’s the right balance?

Ifbyphone just announced a flexible speech-to-text transcription program that offers 3 ways to transcribe audio files (voicemail, IVR and other audio recordings) and 3 quality levels.

Here’s what Ifbyphone says in their press release:

Ifbyphone is the first cloud telephony company to offer customers on-demand access to three levels of transcription quality:

Standard Transcription: Fully automated machine transcription

Premium Transcription: Combined machine and human transcription

Ultra Transcription: Human only transcription

Irv Shapiro, CEO of Ifbyphone, commented on Ifbyphone’s “flexible transcription architecture.” His approach sheds an interesting perspective on our questions of how to offer customers with flexibility, and how much flexibility to offer.

“We are working hard at Ifbyphone to provide businesses of every size with a single source for Automated Telephone Applications which work with any telephone,” Shapiro said. “We continue to enhance our suite with pre-built solutions a company can rent, integrate with their core business processes or extend with custom solutions.”

Notice that Shapiro talks about a single source, not a single solution. By building an architecture with multiple quality choices, customers can decide on the pre-built solution that’s right for them. As the customer, your ability to stay with the same transcription/ automated telephone provider, despite your possibly changing needs, is incredibly valuable. From a marketing perspective, Ifbyphone’s offer draws the “best of both worlds” from the two extremes that we mentioned above. Ifbyphone is not claiming that they provide a “one size fits all” transcription solution, nor are they saying that everyone needs to go through a process of personally customizing a voice transcription service. Rather, they offer a set of automated telephone application choices that put the ball in the customer’s court, and keep the customer in the game for the long run.

When have you confronted the dilemma of how much to customize a product/service in your role as a marketer or as a customer? What advice would you offer other small to mid sized businesses?

Read more about Ifbyphone’s transcription service on their company blog.

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CallFire, a cloud telephony provider, announced their new release of hosted IVR in a press release yesterday. The concept of hosted IVR stresses the need for constant accessibility on a daily basis, even beyond the need for the emergency plans that we spoke about in yesterday’s VoiceNation post.

Let’s first take a look at an excerpt from VoiceNation’s press release about disaster plans:

VoiceNation offers disaster recovery solutions for businesses facing these dilemmas in the form of toll free emergency hotlines for employee and vendor information all the way through a redundant emergency virtual PBX that mirrors existing on-premise equipment. Through VoiceNation, employees can stay connected to their office as long as they have access to some sort of phone or cell phone. By dialing a specified number they can access their entire voice network, voicemail service, and live operators that tell them where to go and explains the corporate emergency plan in place.

Belief in the importance of disaster telephony plans relies on the assumption that a business’s voice communication with customers is critical to its successful operations. This is where hosted IVR comes into the game, by offering businesses a plethora of opportunities to connect with customers, as the CallFire press release says:

Hosted IVR’s feature set supports a wide range of customer uses creating a high degree of personalization in the conversation.  For example, the IVR can be used for a virtual receptionist that will route phone calls, Comprehensive phone surveys that will compile results, or Customized appointment reminders.

CallFire asserts the need for small businesses to use hosted IVR to automate their phone calls and thereby portray a big business voice. On a similar note, VoiceNation’s survey results indicated that only 60% of small businesses are able to reopen after a natural disaster. But the bottom line of both arguments is the same. Small businesses need to invest time and money in choosing the right telephony systems if they want to compete in today’s business environment.

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The Ascent Group announced the upcoming release of their report on “IVR Improvement Strategies for 2010,” due for release this month, January 2010.

The purpose of the study was “to better understand how different companies and industries are utilizing IVR technology to improve service delivery and customer satisfaction and reduce operating costs.”

The process included asking companies to reflect on their current IVR best practices in generating top customer satisfaction, as well as their future implementation plans.

The research presentation expands upon the following description:

This report will profile research participants in a case study format, sharing current IVR practices, lessons learned, challenges overcome, plans for the future, and business practices that have led to improved IVR performance. In addition, the publisher provides detailed results and analysis from the survey itself and detail ‘best practices’ demonstrated by the publisher’s participants.

The report will also profile the IVR technology in place within these companies, provides an analysis of IVR strategies and approaches, including deployment drivers, IVR objectives, IVR measurement techniques, system features, and promotional campaigns. Finally, the report explores the successes achieved as a result of IVR deployment.

Check out the table of contents for a more complete list of Report Analysis and Graph Exhibits.

Even if you are not planning to purchase the actual report, the following excerpt from the summary is quite insightful:

Making voice applications easily web-compatible allows for voice applications to be delivered more easily through a hosted model and through the Internet, through VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol)…

In fact, new standards have enabled a standardized approach to deploying speech-enabled applications throughout a corporation, including: voice-driven IVRs, speech-enabled voice mail and email, voice-activated dialing, and text to speech. Now the corporation can automate internal and external business processes more efficiently through voice interaction.
The new standards and open platforms are creating a shift from hardware to applications and services…

This shift in IVR from PBX boxes to web-based platforms, applications and services makes the analysis of 2010 particularly interesting. In a year so characterized by a movement to the “clouds,” the implications for IVR and its development warrant this thorough analysis.

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From a business’s financial and marketing perspective, the advantages of automated telephone services are clear. IVR and cloud telephony capabilities enable businesses to reduce costs while providing more features and services. Yet, no matter how high the efficiency projections for automated telephone services soar, the bottom line needs to result in customers on the other end of the phone call reporting the best customer service experience.

Do customer’s prefer automated telephone services? The survey says… an overwhelming “yes!”

Nuance’s research into the customer’s reaction and perception of automated telephone services tackles this precise issue. They commissioned a study, conducted by Forrester Research, titled “Driving Consumer Engagement with Automated Telephone Customer Service.” The study found that in straightforward phone interactions, including prescription refills, flight status, checking account balances, store information requests and tracking shipments, customers rated a higher preference for automated services over live agents. In the past year, while 82% of Americans experienced speech recognition software or automated touchtones, only a slightly higher figure of 93% of Americans engaged with live agents.

Customer surveys in five industries showed that customers enjoy proactive automated phone notifications in areas such as appointment reminders and travel updates. Customer interest in these notifications ranged from 80% to 93% in the chosen industries.

Why do customer’s prefer automated services?

A key finding in the survey indicated the following statistics:

The 24-hour 7 days a week availability of automated telephone customer service is a key attribute in consumers’ minds. Seventy-seven percent of consumers pointed to 24-hour, seven days a week availability as a reason they value automated telephone customer service systems. Another 40% valued that they didn’t have to wait on hold for a live agent, while 31% cited the ability to obtain information quickly.

While the survey results came out strongly in favor of automated telephone services, customers did distinguish between their interactions with different systems. For example, 67% of customers noted the importance of an “opt out” function to speak with a live agent, and 75% noted this option as the number one way to improve an automated telephone service. Similarly, customers noticed the importance of a system’s logical call flow as “an essential component,” and 45% noted this feature as the top way to improve customer satisfaction. Speech recognition quality also plays a significant role in the customer’s mind, as 42% of customers wanted the speech recognition to understand them on the first try, and 63% chose this factor as the most important way to improve the customer service experience.

How should marketers and businesses use this study?

According to Nuance,

As the research shows, there is a lot of room to improve customer service. Today’s enterprises have the opportunity to differentiate themselves by considering their customers’ needs and providing intuitive speech applications that improve customer loyalty at every touch point.

Now that this study indicates the acceptability, and in fact preference, of customers for automated telephone calls in certain situations, marketers and businesses must evaluate which of their activities they can automate, and how they can most effectively do so. Choosing the right cloud telephony provider is a good first step.

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Angel.com announced a new simplification of their IVR registration system for the Notify NYC Program. While you can read the full press release on TMCnet or on Angel’s website directly, here’s a basic sum-up of the service:

The Notify NYC program is a citizen warning system that was created to enhance New York City’s public communication channels by distributing critical text and voice messages directly to residents’ computers, mobile devices and cell phones.

Through this system, which is managed by the New York City Office of Emergency Management, residents can get emergency alerts about natural disasters, acts of terrorism, AMBER alerts, public health notifications, public school closings/delays, and updates about parking rules suspensions. The system sends alerts via the Web, e-mail and SMS text messages.

In order to register for the program, residents only need to dial 3-1-1. The IVR system then allows the users to customize which computers phone or mobile devices to route the calls to, as well as which alerts to receive.

This emergency system demonstrates the complete popularization and simplification of IVR’s sophisticated capabilities. The underlying assumption of this program is that any resident of NYC can interact with an IVR system as easily as they can call a friend, or else it would not have been deployed as an emergency program. People today are confronting IVR everywhere they turn.

While small businesses may hesitate to adapt a new IVR solution, perhaps their first, this program shows that public familiarity with IVR has reached a new level of comfort.

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