Have you ever gone to a restaurant, taken a seat, picked up the menu, and realized that the menu was a gargantuan mess of options? It’s an overwhelming feeling and makes it incredibly hard to decide on what you actually want to order. I’ve run into some awfully complicated IVRs in my contact center ACD experience, and not only are they a headache to troubleshoot, but when it comes to testing and navigating through the IVR, it’s quite annoying to have to spend all the time it takes to trial every option. If you can keep your IVR clear and concise, your customers and your support team will be thankful. Here are a few tips.
- Don’t use unnecessary components in your contact center ACD IVR just because you can. All it does it bloat the IVR and may not even do anything useful at all.
- Keep the number of menu option to a minimum if possible. It’s rather eye-rolling, in my opinion, to have to sit through any more than 5 options in a menu. Having 9 options is unbearable, so try to keep those options limited.
- For contact center ACD routes that are better suited to be handled by live agents, try to make that route easy to access, so that your customers don’t have to keep guessing what menu options to press. Reverting back to the main menu because the path I selected was not getting me anywhere useful is quite frustrating.
Creating contact center ACD IVRs can be daunting and complex, but that doesn’t mean that you have to project that onto the end users. Try to keep it simple and your customers will be grateful.