Hey, take it from Snooozy, “The biggest benefit of the IVR system is how quickly an organization can collect information from a person.”
We don’t care what online handle he or she uses, that’s pretty good advice.
Snooozy has some other tidbits for you as well, in case you were wondering just what the advantages of IVR systems might be when it comes to collecting survey information. The fact that yes, it can get a boatload of information pretty quickly is up there, but there are others.
One is that, simply, it can be a critical part of a positive customer experience, and that’s old news -- way back in 2010, TMC noted a survey conducted by Alcatel-Lucent found that “three-quarters of 4,200 respondents said they would continue to business with a company with which they had a great contact center experience.”
In fact, half of all respondents told Alcatel-Lucent they’d dropped a company based on a poor contact center experience.
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Snooozy lists some other advantages of an IVR, besides the fact that it never gets sick, asks for a day off or alienates customers if it shows up to work in a sour mood.
“The biggest benefit of the IVR system is how quickly an organization can collect information from a person,” Snooozy notes, and yes, cost aside, this is the number one benefit of an IVR system for customer surveys: “Within two to five minutes after a service interaction is finished, an organization can have feedback from the clients that how their experience was with them and how they feel.”
And that quickly, an administrator can be data mining to see if there are any red flags in that conversation meriting a quick follow-up call to smooth over a problem or suggestive sell a product or service the customer sounds ready to buy.
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About a year ago TMC’s Linda Dobel wrote, “multi-site, multi-source contact centers have, at this point, come to appreciate the many benefits of transitioning to the cloud. Still, the biggest concern, and therefore the biggest hold back, is security.”
Things haven’t changed all that much between then and now. For hosted predictive dialers, that’s still a central issue; the common thinking is that, while cloud computing may be the big disruptor, if that disruption includes security concerns, count us out.
Paul Shread, editor-in-chief of the IT Business Edge Network, recently took issue with the concept that adopting cloud computing for a call center necessarily means a security tradeoff; that to get the benefits of cloud computing’s price, convenience and other goodies, you have to sacrifice your current comfort level of security.
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South Africa’s Hannes van der Merwe, Mitel product manager at Itec, recently said what most customer service professionals consider gospel truth -- customers really, really despise being abandoned to IVR and auto attendant “hell.”
"Many customers become frustrated when they get a long list of menu options to choose from when they call in to the contact center, and find themselves bounced around between an IVR and agents who can't help them," van der Merwe said. “The process of getting to the right agent should be as fast, simple and seamless as possible for the customer.”
Van der Merwe advocated ACD, or Automatic Call Distribution, as a way to offer salvation to customers yearning to find truth and meaning in their interactions with company support systems. The vast majority of customers ever have only two points of contact with a company, the product and the call center, and the vast majority of customers only ever use the call center when they have some issue with the product. Therefore, almost by definition, your call center is where your customer is either saved or eternally lost.
