The hardest part of managing our IVR clients, is that everybody is suspicious of IVR. Why? Because it’s outdated, because it’s horrible, because it’s got a bad reputation⦠(and if youâve read my previous post, you may see a little splash of dry humour in that!)
IVR is an abstract concept that most people can’t visualise. They don’t know how to understand or experience the customer journey when they see it on paper.
One thing all our clients have in common is their constant worry about upsetting customers. So itâs no surprise that one of the most common questions I get asked is:
“Can you send me a map of the IVR?”
No. Sorry. I actually can’t. There is no ‘map’ of your IVR.
Tell me which customer is calling, and I can tell you what their caller experience will be.
Tell me what products they’ve got, what they most recently bought, when they last called, what other offers they’ve received via other channels, whether theyâre male or female, 14 or 40.
Tell me what their account balance is, their postcode, whether theyâre opted out of marketing.
Tell me whether theyâre a high value client, which customer ‘segment’ theyâre in, when they last travelled abroad and to where, and whether they only contact you by phone.
Tell me if they also use your app, and whether theyâve visited a particular page on your website. Tell me which SMS or email messages they received from your company last week, and which emails they opened or responded to.
Tell me all of these things, and I can show you a map of the call-flow or customer experience for that one, single, particular customer.
But it won’t be set in stone. It may change, halfway through the call, depending on any actions the customer may take, and then it may change again.
A customer segment of one
In the world of modern IVR, much like in the rest of the modern digital world, we’re beyond blanket experiences and generic, untargeted customer experiences and communications.
We are now dealing with an IVR customer segment of one. One of your customers, each handled appropriately, and effectively, one at a time.
Long live the often underappreciated IVR, in a world where we panic if separated from our mobile phone by more than a single armâs reach, and where everybody has a mobile phone glued to them at all times.
And of course, where every caller receives the most relevant possible experienceâ¦
Adaptive, real-time caller experiences
Exhausted from repeated requests for maps of an IVR service that’s designed to hold hundreds, or thousands, of unique call flows, I asked for help from our marketing team to visualise the concept.
They pulled together this 80-second video to show you how it works:
All it takes is a few seconds while we say “hi, thanks for calling”, to check remote and local data sources, and assemble a personalised call flow relevant to each individual caller.
To find out more about our IVR services, please get in touch >
