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:
- Measure user behavior
- Analyze user behavior measurements
- Decide on change
- 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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