Digital Transformation Series Extreme Call Deflection Reinventing Your IVR in the Age of Self-Service Nothing is more polarizing than the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. While companies need the IVR to guide their customers to the appropriate live agent, customers are doing everything within their power to avoid it. According to a survey of 1200 US consumers, 37% of respondents who ended a business relationship did so because of poor customer service, citing IVR frustration. However, the IVR is still a relied upon workhorse: 80% of customer interactions today occur through the voice channel, with 45 billion customer service calls being made this year. Communicating with businesses over the phone has become a sort of “necessary evil” for consumers, who have defaulted to the voice channel after their attempts to self-serve have failed. To combat this, businesses are establishing some ambitious and lofty goals to move customers to their digital channels. Like setting out to climb Mount Everest, it’s essential to have the right team and supplies before beginning the trek. The digital goals of businesses are very transformative in nature and will take a lot of resources and coordination in order to turn these goals into reality.
Transcript
Digital Transformation Series
Extreme Call DeflectionReinventing Your IVR in the Age of Self-Service
Nothing is more polarizing than the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. While companies need the IVR to guide their customers to the appropriate live agent, customers are doing everything within their power to avoid it.
According to a survey of 1200 US consumers, 37% of respondents who ended a business relationship did so because of poor customer service, citing IVR frustration.
However, the IVR is still a relied upon workhorse: 80% of customer interactions today occur through the voice channel, with 45 billion customer service calls being made this year.
Communicating with businesses over the phone has become a sort of “necessary evil” for consumers, who have defaulted to the voice channel after their attempts to self-serve have failed. To combat this, businesses are establishing some ambitious and lofty goals to move customers to their digital channels. Like setting out to climb Mount Everest, it’s essential to have the right team and supplies before beginning the trek. The digital goals of businesses are very transformative in nature and will take a lot of resources and coordination in order to turn these goals into reality.
However, while shifting customers from live agent to self-service is important, businesses should look to achieve this transition without degrading the customer experience. In order to accomplish this, businesses must find ways to make the IVR relevant to customers whose first instinct is to go digital by rethinking the role that IVR plays with digital customers.
Looking at the number of consumers using the phone as their second or third line of defense – this is the area that a lot of enterprises struggle with, but it also presents the most opportunity to make deflection a positive experience.
1. Understand journeys: know your environment2. Right channeling: start with the website first3. Channel shifting: make your IVR web-aware4. Transform voice calls: enhance IVR with digital capabilities5. Future Proof: leverage common assets across touchpoints
We’ve identified 5 steps to help your business achieve extreme call deflection without degrading the customer experience:
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It’s important to do your research and build an understanding of your customer’s journeys. Where are your customers running into issues, where are they shifting channels? Research shows us that 64% of customers start their journey on the website, whether that’s going through PC, laptop, smartphone or tables. So where do they go if they can’t achieve results in the first channel?We’ve found that the second channel selected by consumers is the phone, with 32% choosing to call in. Meanwhile, 25% use the website as their second line of defense, 16% leak to chat, and 14% use the mobile app.
Step 1: Understand Journeys
64% 32%website
phonecall
14%mobile
app
16%chat
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Key leakage points across channel pairs, classified by visitor intent
Web to IVR
Account
Add-on features
Billing
Cancellation
Complaints
Lost and stolen
Marketing
Orders
Other
Payment
Plan
Returns
Sales
Shipping
Technical support
Web to Chat Chat to IVR
For a telco company, we looked at leakage by customer intent across the channels, where customers started and shifted most commonly. By examining chat transcripts and error messages on the web, we were able to identify to points at which customers failed to resolve in the web channel.
Here’s a great example of how companies are using that information and looking at it through a journey lens to analyze channel leakage patterns and reasons.
Knowing where your customers are going and which channels they’re using is not enough. You need to analyze the leakage patterns by using structured and unstructured data to understand cross-channel leakage patterns and user presence. This will give you a sense as to why they’re leaving one channel to enter another, providing the opportunity to improve the experience in their first channel of choice.
We also utilized ‘presence’ which identified which channels or devices customers are using simultaneously. This can be done at an aggregate level using your existing chat or phone agents to run surveys or just ask the callers certain questions, such as “Are you on the website? What kind of device are you using?”
Once you understand where the leakages are, where customers are shifting, what devices they’re using – you’ll want to focus on where your customers are going first. For most companies, this will be about optimizing the website. After all, this is where most of your customers start, so it makes sense to service them right there in that first channel.
Over 60% of customer service journeys are started on the website. The low hanging fruit, and the easiest way to impact call deflection, is through the use of a virtual agent. Instead of using a text-based search of chat bot, virtual agent technology is more dynamic in nature, responding to how customers and their ques-tions change at a rapid rate. Understanding what customers are asking and what their intent is allows virtual agents to determine the best possible solution and take action.
Step 2: Right Channelling
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That’s pretty extreme already, but to take it to the ultimate extreme…
Starting with the website, to complement a virtual agent, proactive chat can be used to engage with customers by agents who have an understanding of their issues based on their click stream and conversation history. Chat agents can then deliver a superior experience by pushing relevant content to customers within the chat channel, providing a rich visual experience. When done right, this will help increase chat engagement and help resolve complex journeys where talking about the issue is a lot harder than having a visual guide or graphical user interface with the chat agents.
As businesses begin to climb the customer experience mountain, we’re going to start seeing some tightly integrated virtual agent and chat agent solutions where escalation from the virtual agent is automated and seamless – and that goes straight to a chat session with the live agent. This can also be proactive based on predictive targeting that lets the agent know that the customer needs to talk to a live agent. This type of hybrid approach, combining of virtual and proactive chat is where we’re really starting to notice high results and extreme call deflection.
At [24]7, we’ve been proven to reduce phone call volume by up to 35% and email volume by up to 50%.
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A lot of customers start from the website, and if they can’t get things done, they’ll cross channels and start talking to an agent. On average, 85% of consumers are crossing channels and 50% of customers are on the website when they call in. So while they’re speaking with a representative, they’re also logged into the corporate website and looking at their account.
Businesses need to capitalise on this multi-device experience by integrating the IVR into the website to make it “web-aware”. So whatever the customer is trying to do on the website, the IVR should be aware and have an understanding what they customer is trying to do. That way, the IVR can deliver a personalized experience, which can help reduce call length, frustration, churn, etc.
Step 3: Channel Shifting
ID and intent predictionIVR: 13 intents, Web: 4 intents
Agent handle time and IVR time decreases
Proactive offersacceptance
CSAT Improvement85%
Results
For instance, a major airline has employed this approach by providing a web-aware IVR experience for their customers who are experiencing challenges booking flights while logged into the airline’s website. When the customer calls, they get a personalized treatment because the web-aware IVR knows what the customer has been attempting to do on the website and is able to immediately address their needs.
For example, the IVR could ask “Are you calling about rebooking your flight today and would you like to talk to an agent about this?” Instead of navigating through an IVR tree to get to an agent who has no context, instead the customer can accept the invitation and be connected directly to an agent who is aware of what the customer is trying to do. This reduces the call length, customer churn and frustration.
The results are impressive. 85% of customers that experience this accepted the invitation to talk with an agent, speeding their journey and improving customer service and satisfaction. For the company, the IVR and average handle time decrease because they’re able to more quickly address the customer’s needs.
Aside from moving the context over from the website to the IVR, there’s so much more that the IVR can do. Whatever the constraints are that the IVR has had over the last 20 years, the voice calls today are primarily being made on smartphones. So why not inject new digital capabilities onto the IVR and provide a digital, more rich and immersive experience through the smart phone?
By leveraging the capabilities of smart phones, a regular voice-based interaction can be transformed into a multi-modal and visual experience where you’re able to include touch, visual, and voice. This allows customers to get what they need to get done in a much easier way.
As you build out this capability, your business can also integrate presence technology to see if the customer is currently engaged on the website while on the phone with a representative. Being able to understand what Being able to understand what channels the customers are engaging with you, and providing a different treatment based on that.
For example, you get a phone call about fraud activity. Instead of hearing the charges, the IVR asks if you would like to see the charges – you say yes, and then you’re able to view all charges directly on your mobile device. If something doesn’t look familiar, you can drill down into it to see details and choose to dispute the charge.
Businesses can also deflect calls to a chat agent when appropriate. For example, qualified callers can be offered the opportunity to connect with a chat agent instead of waiting in the IVR queue to speak to someone. After conducting a warm handoff, the customer is able to continue their interaction within the chat channel instead of waiting for the next live agent on the phone.
Step 4: Transform voice calls
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It’s important to note that call deflection isn’t always about deflecting phone inquiries away from the agent, it’s about shortening the agent handle time and creating more personalized interactions.
Sometimes, as a business, you want people to engage with your agents – but having the processes in place just to make it better, more efficient, for both the customer and your agents will create a superior experience.
Going down this road, there’s certain future proofing that needs to get done, which includes the ability to leverage common assets amongst multiple touchpoints. Whether it’s through self-service or agent assisted service, there’s a wealth of data that can be used to understand the customer’s intent. Based on that information, your business can provide the right self-service capabilities that are in line with what the customer needs.
When working on bringing this all together, it’s best to have one intent model that spans both virtual agent and IVR instead of keeping the solutions siloed from each other. This enables a more fluid customer experience that’s based on providing the right content on the right channel, instead of waiting for the consumer to realize that they’re not in the right channel to address their intent.
The walls that used to segregate a lot of customer interactions are breaking down, and the ability to leverage common data assets across all these touch points allow for businesses to provide a unified digital interaction where channels become channel-less. Whatever input comes in to the voice, chat agents, chat transcripts, virtual agent transcripts – that should all go into one common framework. This is how you can future proof your customer experience and build a channel-less interaction.
In conclusion, you really need to examine the journeys that your customers are taking to understand the environment and how they’re interacting with your business. From there, it’s critical to meet your customer where they go to first, and optimize it. For most companies, that’s the website, so businesses need to start there by integrating web chat and incorporating their IVR system to create a hybrid communication model. Breaking down channel barriers and creating an unified experience by leveraging common assets across all touch points is the best way to future proof your business for the years ahead.
Step 5: Future Proof
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About [24]7[24]7 makes customer service and sales simple. Our platform and applications use big data and predictive analytics to understand customers and drive better service and sales results for large enterprises.
[24]7’s platform enables an omnichannel interaction experience. We connect customer interactions across an enterprise’s web, mobile, chat, social, and phone channels. It’s all in real-time and in the cloud.
Our solutions drive immediate business results. We increase revenues, reduce service and sales costs, and create more satisfied customers.
[24]7 serves the Global 100 market leaders in the Financial Services, Retail, Technology, Telecommunications, and Travel Industries. For more information, visit: 247-inc.com
