How to Stop Your Customers From Defecting Because of Your IVR
1 Nov, 2007
By: Marco PacelliUnfortunately for the IVR there has been a paradigm shift over the last 10 years. Many of the businesses that initially deployed these systems have moved from a customer acquisition model to one of customer retention as markets become saturated. Not surprisingly, many of these business verticals still treat their customers as if they are in an acquisition mode rather than a retention mode. Combine this with the advent of the Internet and ubiquitous use of cell phones and other mobile devices and you have a user population that requires instant information access – and one with less brand loyalty and less patience than any other consumer group.
Complications Emerge
Organizations must have a strategy that includes an effective IVR plan in a business environment without double-digit customer acquisition that does not drive customers to competitors after one negative experience. The short answer is to find a way to self-serve your customers in your IVR better than your competitors and leverage this superior experience to build brand loyalty and additional revenues through up-sell and cross-sell strategies. Better self-service and brand loyalty ultimately lead to higher user satisfaction and ultimately decrease customer churn. A Harvard Business School study concluded that a five-percent increase in customer satisfaction could increase revenues by as much as 95 percent. For a typical Fortune 500 company, this increase in revenues can be as much as $3.25 billion.
Obviously, the research and statistics support a business model that improves the customer’s experience in the IVR and ultimately increases their loyalty to your brand, but how do you decide on the best strategy? There are many avenues you could pursue to determine your strategy. The best would be to consult with your customers and truly understand how they want to interact with your IVR. What types of additional services do they want in your IVR? How do they want to resolve problems (assuming problems will happen from time to time)? What’s an optimal versus non-optimal experience? What does this mean to customer satisfaction and churn? How do tenured users utilize the IVR versus new users? Are the utilization rates similar and if not, why are there differences, etc.?
How do you truly understand customer behavior in your IVR for the thousands to millions of interactions that occur every day? Traditional IVR metrics tell you only how much of something happened, essentially the “what and the when” of user interactions. Customer survey programs generally provide only insight into the areas of your IVR that cause the most pain but rarely garner feedback on what’s working well. Audio analytics can focus only on a sample of user behavior as analyzing all of the audio is cost prohibitive and as of yet only a small percentage of all IVRs are speech enabled. Essentially, there are short comings to every one of these strategies in that they cannot tie together all the major aspects of customer behavior.
Compounding this problem is most companies still believe that by knowing which customers dialed into the IVR and which ones went to a live agent, compared to those who hung up, is enough insight to determine how to better service and retain a customer. This strategy is short-sighted and early adopters of behavioral analytics solutions are proving the case for increased visibility into the “how and the why” of customer behavior.
What is the Solution?
Behavioral analytics show not only what the customer did, but also why he or she transferred or hung up. It can also show how many times the customer attempted to perform the same request in the past hour(s) or day. Does this customer perform the same request weekly, monthly, annually and is it the same behavior pattern every time or a different one?
Another important aspect of developing a customer retention strategy is to accurately determine where the customer started. Was he or she on a Web page, a handheld or in a store prior to the call into the IVR? These can all be answered by tracking the customer across all touch points and building a blueprint of customer behavior patterns.
Imagine this experience. You walk into a store and purchase a product. You are very excited about this purchase and just spent substantial dollars on your new gadget and you cannot wait to get home and try out all the new features. You drive home from the store and dive into the 400-page user guide only to discover that something does not work the way it should or maybe not at all. Being tech savvy you hit the Internet, visit the product page and look at FAQs to see if there is a knowledgebase on your particular problem, skim a few product blogs and ultimately get frustrated after 15-30 minutes of looking for an answer. So, you dig out the contact-us documentation that came with your product and you call the 1-800 number for support.
You’re greeted by a cheery voice recording in the IVR that invites you to visit www.productxyz.com for questions about said gadget. Then you’re presented with a menu of options regarding your product – none of which really matches what you’re looking for. You say “help” or press a # and the system replies with “I think you said help” or something similar and you lose your cool and start pressing zero or saying “agent.” Fortunately the routing logic works correctly and you end up with an equally helpful customer support agent who dutifully collects all of your information, listens with much interest to you as you explain your problem for two minutes and then in an equally cheery voice tells you, “I am sorry, I cannot help you with that problem, you will have to take the product back to the store.” After three to four hours of trying to get help, you return the product to the store, resolve to never do business with that company again and go spend your money on a competitor’s product.
The real problem in this scenario is that if you asked the customer his or her impression of the IVR, you would be told it was awful and did not meet the need. The point is your business practices leave something to be desired and have caused the customer to take business elsewhere. What will be equally shocking to the company that just lost this customer is that when it tries to track this experience through traditional metrics, everything will seem to have worked as designed.
At the point of sale, a new transaction was registered and a product sold, which was tracked as a positive occurrence. The customer then visited the Web and looked at FAQs utilizing self-help. Web analytics tracked this inquiry, which again was viewed as positive because self-help was used. The IVR then took the brunt of the customer’s impatience at the first sign of not being able to help with the query as the customer has already expended all patience in other touch points. Traditional metrics will show that the customer hit the IVR, but not provide any insight into why the customer did not complete the transaction, but again still be rated positive because it did route to an agent when requested. Last, the customer routed to an agent who then closed out the trouble ticket by sending the customer back to the store for resolution. Again a positive as the trouble ticket is closed in the CRM system. The product return comes as a complete shock because according to the logic detailed, above all of the business rules functioned as designed. However, when you glue all of these occurrences together for a 360 degree view of the customer, it suddenly becomes clear why the customer was dissatisfied with the experience not only in the IVR, but across all touch points.
Behavioral analytics allows the foundation for personalizing the next generation of IVR applications to better fit the behavior patterns customers manifest. Imagine IVRs that know who we are, understand our preferences and can make decisions based upon not only our traditional demographic information, but also our behavioral blueprint to provide the optimal self-serve experience. IVRs are here to stay, but an IVR that provides an experience as easy as the ATM will certainly improve customers’ opinions of them and stop them from defecting.
