Many people do not like IVR ( Interactive Voice Response) system simply because it is a ‘machine’, not human and they do not like the idea of ‘talking’ to machine! But there is an IVR application with whom many would like to deal with, instead of dealing with an human agent, the service is IVR for payment reminder!

One may forget to make a payment for utility bills, credit card bills or any other bill for many reasons! It is always embarrassing for a person to be reminded of pending unpaid bills! And if the payment reminder is done by human agent, many people feel uncomfortable with the knowledge that ‘other person’ too know know his secret of not paying bills!

There may be instances where a person is simply unable to pay bills! And with recent economic problems all around the world, many may have been victims of job loss and then one may become genuinely unable to pay bills! When a person goes through such distress, being reminded by a human agent of pending unpaid bills might result in more depression!

But outbound IVR for reminding of pending payment would not embarrass a person so much as a call from human agent would! Recently, I had a discussion with my friend Rahul Mishra, who blogs about Indian Real Estate about how many people default payment for their housing loans or installment for their flats during construction of apartments! While some people love to be reminded, but majority of the people feel embarrassed! And automated IVR would not embarrass a person as he/she would be reminded by a machine called IVR with no emotion, heart or feelings!

So, and outbound IVR for reminding pending bills is one IVR application in which a person may not like to speak to a human agent! Here are my few ideas:-

1. Everyone should use outbound IVR for reminding a person for pending unpaid bills at least three or four times before any human agent or recovery agents calls up in order to avoid embarrassing a customer!

2. During this call, the person should be given options like press 1 if already paid, 2 if will pay next week and does not want to be reminded again in between, 3 if he wants some one to collect payment from his house etc. This way, payment reminder service would be delightful even for defaulting customers!

3. Outbound IVR can also be able to transfer the call to human agent of the called party desires so!

So, in order to recover money or take payment from your customers, are you treating them cruelly ? Use outbound IVR to remind them gently and treat your customers humanly!

Recently, Tata Docomo, India is advertising about IVR used in its customer care where it says that in order to keep it simple, they allow caller to speak to human agent quickly without going through maze of key-presses, listening lengthy and boring menu announcements!

Well, one line comes to my mind quickly, if you want your caller to get connected to human agent, without having to use self service IVR, then please use ACD ( automatic call distribution ) system available in almost any PBX available now a days!

The actor is Ranbir Kapoor, one of the most popular young actor in Hindi film industry. The script is in Hindi, the English translation would look resemble below :-

“Think if every one starts speaking the way customer care of mobile compaies treat their customer when they call,”

Daughter would say, “Daddy, may I have ice cream ?”
Father would reply, “If you want now, press 1, if you want to have it later, press 2″ ( laughter)

Daughter : Daddy, do you love me ?
Father : Your question is very important to us, please be online

(laughter)

While TATA-DOCOMO may think that making their caller to speak to human agent, “they are keeping it simple”, they should remember few points here about IVR :-

1. IVR is essentially a system which is capable of providing important information to caller on telephone in voice without any human intervention. While the same task can be performed by human, but machines perform better than human 24 hours a day with more efficiency as they don’t tire, they don’t take lunch break ( or attends natures call )!

2. A machine like IVR gets tired or bored unlike humn either it is morning or evening, summer or winter and can never abuse the caller even when abused or provoked by the caller!

3. Machines do not leave the job and join a rival company!

Finally, while IVR may not be the answer to all customer problems, but it can surely provide some information related to mobile phones like prepaid balance, listen to current bill amount and bill due date etc.

So, TATA Docomo should hire IVR specialist or VUI ( Voice User Interface) designer to make their customer care simpler and more efficient!

While outbound IVR systems are being widely used now a days for many promotional activities, but outbound IVR potential as smart predictive dialer is still to be tapped.

While many acknowledge that, outbound IVR has many advantages over predictive dialer, call centers still deploy predictive dialer for making outbound calls and then transferring the calls to human agents.

History of predictive dialer shows, it came to be used in call centers for increase efficiency of human agents, as well as effective monitoring by supervises. Predictive dialer increase productivity by automating the dialing, then detecting answering machine, FAX tone or human answering and then connecting to human agent. Any outbound IVR with small computation power using CPA ( Call Progress Analysis) can achieve these and much more!

Another major advantage of outbound IVR ( or any IVR for that matter) is its availability in both on-premise and hosted environment. Hosted environment provides many advantages like low initial cost as well as sudden spike in call volume! Predictive dialer are normally on premise and sudden spike of calls can only be served by increasing number of ports in it.

So, why call center owners are still having separate predictive dialer and not using their inbound IVR as predictive dialer in outbound IVR configuration ?

As I had interacted some call center owners as well as few vendors for call center industry, I think, in India, only two reasons for not using outbound IVR as predictive dialer :-

1. Lack of information
Not many people are aware that IVR can be used for making outbound calls and then transferring it to human agent along with call whispering or agent pop up with the connected call. Many call center owners include inbound IVR, but they are not aware or made aware that the same IVR could be used for making outbound calls as well as it can eliminate predictive dialer all together.
IVR being based on a PC, it has many options for monitoring, accessing data from various sources as well as present status of calls and activity of human agents.

2. Lack of confidence in IVR applications
While predictive dialer is a proven product, but many consider IVR applications to be just add-on and stand-by arrangement in India. Most probably, this has to do with technology adoption problem! Also, many people cite example of ‘hard coded’ IVR applications and lack of support and maintenance by IVR companies. Most of the IVR companies in India uses CTI boards APIs to develop IVR applications instead of open standards or tools. It may create problem in upgrading the application as well as maintenance.

So, it looks like outbound IVR will not be able to replace predictive dialer as preferred ‘smart dialer’ in call center in near future in India.

Everyone involved in IVR industry may have heard reasons why normal users, customers ‘hate’ using IVR ( Interactive Voice Response) Systems. There are many reasons why people hate using IVR and how IVR could be made more user-friendly with good VUI design practices. I thought I would update top five things about IVR that people hate about.

1. Duplicate Information

When customer calls to any call center looking for support, query etc., they are normally answered by IVR and customer needs to provide their information like phone number, account ID etc. ( depending on services they subscribe to). After all these ‘question-answer-round’ and agonising repeat-confirmation round by IVR, customer is finally connected to a CSR or human agent. But immediately, customer is asked the same questions which he had already answered to IVR!

Simple POP-UP screen at CSR dsktop is the solution and many call center do not use them and the customer ire falls on IVR!

2. Being on-hold for long time before one may speak to human agent

After customer’s call is connected and then when she chooses to speak to human/live agent, IVR takes long time to actually transfer the call to live agent as live agents are busy. While everybody agrees that human resources are costly, but so are the time of customers/callers! This long time required for successful call transfer to human agents make customer hate IVR.

Smart predictive dialer is one solution to this.

3. Irritating music on hold/advertisement

As if making wait to speak an human agent is not enough to antagonize the caller, many people use IVR to play irritating music or advertisements while call hold! Imagine, one customer wants to complaint about a service and he gets to listen to advertisements about the same service while waiting to lodge her complaint against the very service!

It is not possible to play music which would be liked by everyone. Simple all waiting tone or announcing of time remaining till CSR would be free to attend the call should be good enough information during call wait.

4. Having to repeat YES/NO in ASR and DTMF pressing

Many ASR ( automatic speech recognition) repeats the answer by the caller and asks to confirm by speaking YES or NO. While this may be a required step for validating user input for IVR developer, but it becomes irritating for a caller having to confirm every answer or repeating the same. It is not easy to press telephone keys using a mobile phone, so many people simply hate IVR for making them press DTMF keys!

Looks like IVR will not be able to come out of this!

5. Long Menu

Some IVR of call centers really provide long menus or long options to choose from! If there are 9 options in an IVR and if IVR plays them as soon as caller is connected, most probably, caller would disconnect his call before he hears the 3rd option! Many people hate IVR for making them hear options which are not required by them!

We can hope, with smart IVR systems and good VUI design practice, this hatred can be reduced.

Predictive dialer can be termed as smart auto-dialer.  Auto dialer dial out telephone number and handover or transfer the call to human agent in a call center.  Once the dialed number answers, the call agent or telemarketer starts speaking as per the outbound call center function.

Now there can be many situations where the process as described above may not go as expected. For example,

1. The dialed number may be busy. In that case, call agent will hear busy tone and disconnects wasting precious time of the call agent who is paid by the hour.

2. The dialed number simply does no reply. Poor call agent will listen the dialed number ringing and listening it over! Wasting precious time as well as patience.Though now a days, the dialed number may play a hit number of the season thanks to CRBT ( Caller Ring Back Tone), but that is not why a call agent is employed.

3. The dialed number turns out to be a FAX or a voice mail! Another miss!

4. The dialed number simply choose to disconnect the call. Yes, if the dialed number is a mobile number, they can disconnect a call and it was not possible for land line number though! Another miss by call agent!

5. What if auto-dialer dials out a number successfully, but no call agent to take to call ? This time the cursing will come from the dialed number.

6. With NDNC ( National Do Not Call) registry in place in almost every country ( even in India) in the world by now, one can not dial out to any telephone number! What happens if the dialed number is listed NDNC ? Hefty fine as well as few curse from the dialed number.

Predictive dialer tries to solve all the above problems! This obviously will increase call time by call agents or tele-marketer in a call center manifold! This will increase efficiency as well as profitability of the call center.

So, predictive dialer is the smart auto-dialer which can increase agent talk time thereby increasing productivity as well as efficiency. It allows higher utilization of resources in call center and higher profit.

Now, how about an IVR system for smart auto dialing job ? have a look at the call flow attached below :-

IVR as Smart Auto Dialer or Predictive dialer

I am pretty sure this ( outbound IVR) can replace traditional predictive dialer or auto dialer which will be much cheaper, feature rich as well as scalable.

Few enhancements:-
1. Once call is connected, it can announce to the caller in the sweetest voice possible, what is the call is about and ask if s/he is interested to know more and then transfer the call to telemarketer or call agent. I am sure it will screen dialed person and increase conversion ratio!
2. Outbound IVR as predictive dialer can also get feedback.

Finally, I would say, it is time for you to switch to outbound IVR from your predictive dialer. Or, if you were a call center owner and wanted to have a predictive dialer, re-think and seriously evaluate outbound IVR. you may contact me.

IVRS is supposed to be force multiplier in the filed of customer service in a call center. But is your IVRS increasing customer satisfaction or has become an irritant to your caller ? Here are five Tips to make your IVRS a force multiplier in your call center.

1. CRM Integration

You must integrate your CRM with IVRS! Without integrating your IVRS with Call center, you can not say really that IVRS is improving customer service.  Integrating with CRM gives IVRS the features like identifying the caller with his all information and customer does not need to enter his identification details. This will shorten the time to serve the customer and customer will also stick to IVRS.

2. Allow Call Transfer to Human Agent

At any point of time, customer must be given option to speak to a customer care human executive! Many a time, caller knows that he has to speak to human agent only to explain his requirements or problem, and then if he does not find any option to speak to live agent, he might simply turn to your competitor. This is specifically true for general purpose call center or customer care. One must do a fine balance with call screening with live agent call transfer.

3. Never Ask Customer Details Twice

In many IVRS, it is observed that customer has to enter his details for using IVRS and and then when he is transferred to a human agent, he needs to repeat his customer details again to the human agent! Never ever do that! This will irritate the customer to no end and your customer care center may turn into customer irritation center. It may happen also when customer goes back to IVRS main menu and then he may require to enter his customer details again, never do that.

4. Precise and To the Point

Be precise and to the point in presenting any information. Also make navigation menus short, easy to navigate.  You should keep an option to transfer the call to a human agent at every level as well as go back to main menu. Long menu will scare away the caller and he would tend to forget the options.

5. IVRS Information

Always keep an Help Option the main menu. It should have information about the IVRS itself and what customer can expect from it and what not! Also give caller the approximate time for connecting to live agent! I would suggest you not to play prompts like “Your Call is important to us, please be online while we are connecting your call to customer care officer.”, this kind of message if repeated many times, may infuriate a caller, specially when the caller has a complaint.

The above list of five is not exhaustive! But the bottom line of most effective use of IVRS is : Customise your IVRS as per your business.