Using IVR to catch customers before they complain |
Exchange Daily, No 71, 07 May 2009, Stuart Corner
At the end of the customer's call to the contact centre they are offered the chance to take the short survey which involves them speaking or pushing buttons in response to questions from the IVR system. One Global Speech Networks' customer, Diners Club, gives all its callers the option to take the survey and about 30 percent take up the offer, according to GSN CEO, Nick Rodda. He said the system could be extremely valuable as a means of forestalling the increasingly common practice of disgruntled customers making their feelings very public with posting on social networking sites such as Twitter. "You are seeing a lot of reactive strategies from organisations signing up to sites like Twitter to try and forestall customer complaints, but we say they should more proactive and try to identify dissatisfied customers before they start posting. With IVR they are able to capture the level of a customer's discontent in real time immediately after the call and take immediate action if necessary." Rodda added that feedback from the survey system could also be integrated with call centre performance reporting statistics. "The other thing we are seeing IVR being used more and more, particularly in the US is proactive outbound communication to customers: if you have a problem you know it going to impact on your customer base being pro-active and letting them know goes a long way to reduce the level of dissatisfaction." He said that an organisation did not need do be an existing GSN customer to use the service: it could be provided to any organisation as a stand-alone application. |