Are you losi
ng customers to a bad dialplan? Trouble navigating an IVR is one of the most common customer service complaints people have. Why irritate your clients with a bad menu system? The truth is, it’s not always easy to build an IVR that is simple enough for most clients, yet sophisticated enough to route calls to the right party. Your call center’s ACD system may depend on it, however.
This past weekend I received a call which disconnected the moment I answered it. Wanting to make sure there hadn’t been a problem with the call itself or my phone, I called the number back. I had recognized the caller ID, and so was braced for a difficult IVR experience. I decided to try for a few minutes, then send an email out to everyone I knew at that company to see if there was an issue that needed attention. Much to my pleasant surprise, the menu system was clear and concise, and without knowing the identity of the caller, I was still connected to the correct party after pressing only two keys.
Things that can help you design a good IVR are:
- Quality sound files. It’s important to make sure you call in and listen to the audio after you have uploaded the files to the system. All too often an audio file that sounded good in your recording software sounds quiet or muddy when Asterisk is forced to transcode and you have no control over volume.
- Make the menu simple at each step. If your descriptions are long or there are too many options, people will get confused.
- Make sure that it’s easy to reach a live person. People who get frustrated in the attempt to reach a live person are not going to be terribly happy once they finally get through.
- Test, test, test. Verify your audio files, test that the options go where they’re supposed to, and make sure time of day elements are working. It’s unnecessarily cruel to let someone wait in a queue for an hour after your last agent has gone home for the day. It also lets you find the issues that may not be apparent in the design. Having your music on hold interrupted every 15 seconds with a customer service message may seem like a good idea, but if you’re waiting ten minutes to reach an agent, it might be its own form of torture for your clients.
Q-Suite 5.7 introduced the Visual IVR builder, which allows you to design your IVR in a drag-and-drop manner. The ability to revision the dialplan, upload audio files independently of the dialplan, and multiple options to reach your dialplan allow for simple version testing when designing and updating your IVR. Our intent is to make it as easy as possible for you to improve your client experience every time they reach out to you.