Interactive Voice Response (IVR) gained popularity in the 1980s as a means to offload routine inquiries from customer service representatives and achieve cost savings.  Unfortunately, poor application design caused caller dissatisfaction, low adoption rates, and excessive exits from the system to reach “live” assistance.

IVR doesn’t have to elicit groans from callers.  Well-designed applications offer convenient, fast, confidential service anytime, anywhere.  When companies revamp their applications and streamline their menus, they can realize a 10-30% increase in usage.  This success translates into improved customer satisfaction and hard dollar savings.  And with speech recognition, new application opportunities are on the horizon.

Our Practice
We use best practices as the yardstick for assessing your current offerings and designing new services.  We look at management reports to understand usage patterns.  We solicit feedback from your customers and service representatives on features they’d like to see, as well as “pain points” in existing applications.  We observe calls to capture the language used when callers make requests.

Our recommendations address:

• Application design and usability (call flow logic, user interface, scripting, voice quality)
•  Features and functions (breadth, appropriateness for the media, personalized for callers)
• Use of technology (touch-tone versus speech recognition, system integration, management reporting)
• Consistency with call center and web-based services (functions, user interface, terminology, information content)

We can also provide assistance with identifying and designing new applications, usability testing, acceptance testing, CSR training, and marketing.