Is IVR Bloat Affecting Your Callers?
Interactive voice response (IVR) is a useful tool to help navigate callers to the correct destination in a large organization. However, many phone trees become so unwieldy and “bloated” that they instead degrade the caller experience and customer satisfaction. When too many options are crammed in, you waste people’s time and frustrate them − putting your brand reputation and your revenue on the line.
To illustrate this, let’s look at an example from a Parlance customer. This large insurance provider employed a complex IVR on their main service line. By conducting end-to-end call analysis on this service line (analyzing calls from initial dial in, through all transfers and interactions), Parlance discovered that a full 50% of callers abandoned the call and hung up at some point rather than completing their IVR navigation. Parlance also found that there were 59 different call paths through the IVR. However, 96% of callers only utilized 4 different call paths. This means 55 call paths are unnecessary, causing caller frustration, and leading to call abandonment. These findings disproved many assumptions service managers had concerning their call management processes, leading the company to work towards a much simpler, faster, more streamlined call management process with Parlance voice-enabled call routing.
IVR bloat is an all-too-common problem that frustrates callers every day. Place yourself in your customer’s shoes. Is your IVR overly complex? Does it offer too many different options? Are you automating call navigation efficiently in your organization, and can callers use their voice to access the people, services, and departments they need without expending much time and effort? It may be time to rethink your automation solution entirely.
