WHY AND WHERE IVRS IS REQUIRED AND USED

IVRS can be directly compared with a website! So many people aptly say IVRS to be a Voice Portal. It does not compete with website, rather it complements the website. The way any organization has an website, it must have one IVRS too.

Some of the important reasons to have IVRS are:
1. Providing information about the company 24 hours a day. And customer does not have to come to the office of the company, rather he can just use his phone and make a call. Just like visiting a website.
2. Executive of a company has to provide same information again and again to different and new customers again and again. It can be made fully automated using an IVRS. It will not only reduce cost, it will also decrease the hold time for the customer.
3. IVR is used widely many enquiry and complaint logging systems. So in a service industry, having a IVRS is a must.
4. For customer support, with IVRS, many customer problems can be sorted out without any human intervention. Also, it helps gather the support engineer required mundane and routine information much faster helping both the customer and the company.

Some Industrial sectors that use IVRS or must use widely are:

1. Transport industry – Enquiry, Reservation and status.
2. Medical Industry - Reporting, Appointment, and immediate alert.
3. Banking - Account Information, Transaction Information, Tele-banking
4. Telecom - Subscriber Information, Service Activation-deactivation, Billing Information, many more.
5. Service Industry - Customer Support and scheduling of service
6. Manufacturing - Stock Update, Enquiry
7. BPO - IVRS is integral part of a call center

Any company that has a customer support division and complaint registration must have IVRS. It will greatly improve efficiency, lower cost, improve brand image. And much more!

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USABILITY GUIDELINES OF IVR SYSTEMS

Fact is, an IVR is a technical interface to humans, just like a web site is. And just like many web sites, it was probably built and programmed by some engineers without a lot of direction from Marketing or Customer Service. There’s really no reason at all why the folks optimizing the web site should not also optimize the phone system too - especially if they do a good job with the web site in terms of usability! Here are the guidelines for optimizing usability:

1. Be Specific and to the point.
Once the voice prompts and information are recorded, each and every sentence, word should be examined if they are required or not. The message should be conveyed in shortest possible phrase. Unfortunately there is no way to predict effectiveness of the IVR prompts except testing with real callers. Some menus may require little descriptions to make it more understandable to the caller.
2. Setting Priority of Information
The biggest drawback in IVRS visa-a-vis its counterparts are, they have to be presented in serial manner, ie. The menu is played one option then the next one. Its unlike a website, where all options, links are presented visually in the webpage and some links are blinking, some are bold etc. Alas, in an IVR Applications, one does not have that luxury! The implication here is that you need to find out which paths through the system are going to be the "journeys" most traveled by your users, and you need to put these at the top of the menus, to make sure the experience is short, direct and hassle-free.
3. Build Prototype and test on real users before commissioning
Acceptability of your IVR System by your customer can not be properly predicted. So the best way is to build a prototype and ask your clients to use it and get their feedback. You should make a complete call flow of your IVRS, circulate among your clients and get feedback. You may also circulate your script. Many times, scripts looking good and logical may not sound logical while listening on telephone!
4. Professional Scripting for IVRS prompts and information
All the sentences or voice prompts, information should be professionally scripted. Scripting should be done as per the industry where the IVRS is being used as well as the target callers.
5. Use short menu and Menu style
Designing a effective and attractive menu is a real challenge in IVR Application. Menu should be short in options, brief in discussion. Also you should always describe the option before speaking the option number. For example, use “to know about our promotional sales discount, press 3”, instead of press 3 to know about our promotional sales discounts”. It will help caller remember the option as per the description. Long menu tends to bore the customer specially when his required option is spoken at last.
6. Use professional Voice-Over Artist
In a IVR System, audio is of prime importance. Poor quality audio, background noise, poorly edited audio will give a poor impression on your company. It will also give them impressions about how your company works. So it is strongly advised that one should hire a professional voice-over artist and get all scripts recorded in a studio by a sound recorder. It may cost you little more, but it is worth every penny.
7. Avoid Promotional Messages
Normally, you should avid putting any promotional messages in between your prompts or information. You actually never know who might call you. Though some marketing people in your organization may insist on putting some promotional messages, remember one thing, a person may get impatient and can be in a bad mood. It may serve the other way around then!
8. Make IVRS Adaptive and Intelligent
IVRS should be capable of intelligently adapting menu options. For example, it should wish “Good Morning” in the morning and “Good Afternoon” at afternoon. One should also monitor and analyze call patterns, oft-used menu options, hang ups, call failure, dropped calls periodically and change the priorities of menus. Adapting to customer need is the key to success of a IVRS.
9. Never rely exclusively on Help menu
Though one should provide thoroughly user-tested help menu, but never rely on them. No one wants to read help menu or refer to help menu except when one is stuck up. So, it is advisable that menus be designed smartly self-evident and obviously logical. Also never give excuses like “its all described in the help menu” to customer.
10. Use standards
There are a number of standards for IVR system design, such as HFES 200.4 and ISO/IEC 13714. One should use them to test their IVRS for usability test. BEST way of USABILITY of IVRS is still hiring an IVRS EXPERT like yours sincerely. :)
11. Avoid Long gaps in between menus or information
Never pause long for any reason. Once caller gets silence for more than 3 seconds or so, he might think something has gone wrong and press some other keys! But then a menu with short gap can make a rapid fire menu and will be difficult to use for caller. A perfectly paced menu should be adopted as per target caller, complexity of the features. The best way to achieve perfectly paced prompts are again testing by users!
12. Make Voice sounding natural as much as you can
Here is an important guideline. The prompts, information should sound natural sentence. For example, in normal conversations, one normally emphasizes on the last word. The IVRS recording should follow the same pattern too. For that reason, a sentence should be recorded fully with the complete script. Putting new words in between a sentence should be avoided. Also, one should never use “constructed sentences” where words are recorded separately! It will not have a proper flow of a sentence and give very poor quality and wrong impression. It will also reflect unprofessional approach in the business.
13. Keep your features small
IVRS should have small specific features! For a large organizations, where more features are must, it is advisable to use separate numbers for user to dial. Or user should be given option to access particular service by some direct dialing method. Now a days many exchanges offer facility to configure range of a number. For example, 56969XX where 56969 is actual number, but user can dial 5606901 for sales department, 5696902 for accounts, etc. This helps serve the customer better!

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FREQUENTLY OVERLOOKED PROBLEMS IN IVR APPLICATIONS

These are many small, but important design problems one often tends to overlook. I have tried to list them all. Kindly send me feedback if you have encountered any such problems. In a DTMF Based Menu Following are the frequently overlooked problems :-
1. Long Menu
Be it DTMF Driven menu or Voice driven menu, long menu with many options should be avoided. The maximum menu options should be 5. ( Maximum 7 in unavoidable cases. ) Long menu tires a caller out and it becomes very difficult for caller to remember the options too. Also if a caller's required option is played at the last of the menu( for example 9th option in the menu, one has to hear out first 8 options before hearing the 9th option.), it becomes realy irritating.

2. Long Period of Silence
Long period of silence at any case should be avoided. Maximum allowable silence period should be 3 Seconds. After that a proper timeout message should be played.

3. Rejection of key pressing during prompt playing.
It is often noticed that IVR ignores the key pressed while it is playing menu options. This should be avoided. Specially while playing a long menu of 4 and above options. During playing prompts too, keys pressed by caller should be accepted and processed accordingly.

4. Hang Up calls
IVRS should never hang up the call at any condition. Its like slamming the phone on you! You cause enough pain already by making a human interact with a machine, so it will be worthwhile that machine does not hang up on the human!

5. Scripting of IVR Prompts
Scripting of IVR menus and any information should be properly written. Many people do not give enough importance in scripting their information. Scripts like You have pressed a wrong key, You have failed to press a key in time, etc. should eb avoided.

6. Confusing and illogical presentation of Information
All information given by IVRS should be brief, to-the-point, in simple english and complete. Unnecessary jargons should be avoided.

7. Failure recovery
On failure of accessing any data from a database or online information, IVR should inform politely to the caller.

8. Unprofessional Voice
Cheap sounding and unprofessionaly recorded, low quality voice should be avoided. One should always get prompts recorded by professional voice artist. Background music should be added only when the situation demands or service requires it.

In a Voice Driven Menu:-

9. In a Voice Driven menu the menu tends to be extra focussing on entertaining the caller, rather than providing service required by him.

10. Attempt to have a conversation with caller should be avoided. Even though ASR technology works fine, still it can not have a conversation with a human.

11. Avoid having excessive human like Interface.


12. Avoid playing prompts as soon as call is connected. Give some silence or play some music for small duration.

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REQUIREMENT OF USABILITY IN IVRS

So, you thought IVRS is some Computer Telephony Integration Hardware and a piece of Software, installed and running 24 hours a day on a Personal Computer to play recorded voice as soon as a caller calls the IVRS Number?
You have completely under-estimated IVRS. But then don’t loose your heart, you belong to the majority! And it’s perfectly fine to underestimate.
But then imagine the following scenarios:-

1. You call your telephone company customer service number. You are welcome to Customer Care service. Then some music. Then it starts giving out long list of options to choose. Some options are for pressing a key and some require you to speak one word or some words. But then its not what you were looking, so you want to speak to an customer care executive. Normally its by pressing 9. So, dutifully you press 9. Another melody. Then you get to hear, “Your Call is Important to us”, please wait while we are transferring your call. Another melody! Already 2 minutes gone, Your call is important to us, again, cool, they are making your call important by making you talking to a machine! 4 minutes gone by then, and finally you get to hear, All our customer care executives are busy. Your call is important to us. Please wait while we are trying to connect you to our customer care executive. The approximate time for connection is 4 minutes. Kindly hold the line or please call later. You take the advice. You hang up and call after 10 minutes. The same procedure follows! What you do? Utter some profanities/expletives and slam the phone down?
2. You call large enterprise customer support number. Welcome prompts! Then a list of teeth breaking technical sounding department list. You somehow manage to remember the option for your department and press the right key or speak the right word and IVRS could understand! Then the next prompt comes! This particular division is closed now! Thank you for calling. And then you hear a busy tone! Did they shut the door in front of your face ? What you can do? Slam the phone. Stamp your feet on your floor?

There are many more similar situations! You scratch your head and wonder what made them call themselves Customer Care Service? Where you did not even get the care, let alone the service you were looking?

The answer is lack of knowledge of usability of IVRS by the design engineer or the company!

Make no mistake, like any other software, IVRS is also normally designed and developed by some software engineers without much input from either marketing or customer service people. And they will concentrate more on software features like call flow, database integration, TTS Integration, smart speech recognitions and many more.

What are the consequences of IVRS with poor usability? They are:-
1. Frustrated and Angry customers ( you will hear lot of expletives and profanities you record your IVRS calls and dare to listen them)
2. High call duration but no satisfactory service to the customer. Poor usage of IVRS
3. High hang ups.
4. Increased cost as it will transfer more calls to customer care executives.
5. Decline in customer satisfaction affecting brand value of the company.

But then you need not worry, I have a collection of tips to increase usability of IVRS. To be posted shortly.

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