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WebWord Weblog Posting Posting Date: November 10, 2002 Press 1 for a Human - Best Phone System Practices for Connecting with Customers -- "Having the best customer representatives in the world isn't enough if the customers can't reach them or get frustrated and angry along the way. If customers can't get the help and attention they need they will eventually take their business elsewhere. Optimizing your phone system to best support your customers' needs is a quick and extremely cost-effective way to raise overall customer service." (Comments: Good article with good advice. However, like it or not, the cost of directly interacting with a human is substantially higher than delivering an automatic message. What this article or a follow up needs, is an ROI calculation showing that the usability is worth the expense. Doing the best thing for customers is not always the right thing to do.)
Reader Comments...
Let's face it: there are very few fans of IVR. This article describes some best practices for IVR systems. However, it leaves out many I would consider critical. Most importantly, the best phone systems are based on customer data--they offer the options and information people are most likely to want. Of course, the only way to know what people want is to do customer research. The best IVR call trees are iterated upon based on customer feedback. The wording of the prompts is carefully crafted to reflect the caller's vocabulary--while professional sounding recording is important, what those recordings say and how they flow is far more important. Good IVR systems can address many customer needs. There is no question that addressing such needs in an automated fashion is less expensive than addressing them with humans. Let's focus on improving the quality of IVR, since it's the hand we've been dealt. Posted by: Shelly on November 13, 2002 04:54 PM
My mobile phone provider in the UK encourages you to use their website for ALL interaction with them. They make it very difficult to find a telephone support line for them, and the website goes out of the way to provide you with answers to FAQs rather than allowing you to simply email a query to them. When you do manage to email them, you always get an automated response which is usually useless and doesn't include the text of your original query (which you don't have either, because you email them via a form). This, I believe, is an extreme example of the approach discussed in this article. But it's an illustration of a company which has lost sight of the objective of customer support. Their system should support customers, not aim to minimise their support costs above all else. Posted by: Alan Fisher on November 14, 2002 04:04 AM
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