A new standard for industry best practices was unveiled this month, by a group called Gethuman. It's run by Paul English, who has created something of a cottage industry out of teaching people how to exit from IVR systems. He publishes a list of the exit codes for the IVR systems in many of corporate America's most famous companies.
While we may want to give him points for ingenuity and even a pat on the back for being so darned subversive in the name of customer empowerment, there are some startling flaws to the logic and methodology inherent in this approach. Trying to get a human just because you want one has the effect of raising costs in small, imperceptible ways that aren't apparent to the caller, but make themselves felt over time.
IVR and self-service tools exist because the cost of providing agented service to every caller is prohibitively high. IVR is designed to fend the repetitive and automatable away from the agent because it just doesn't make sense to pay an agent to do the boring job of telling you what your bank balance is. That's not the best use of an agent's time, and agents are expensive.
If you can reduce the overhead cost of customer service by automating these chores, then you may be able to build in price reductions in the product or service you're selling. The provision of self-service allows a company to offer better, more reliable and cheaper products.
If you want a quality interaction when you need it most (i.e., when the complexity of the interaction requires human understanding and intervention), then you have to be prepared to accept an automated interaction when you really don't need a human. Encouraging people to bail on an IVR system teaches them to do something that's not in their long term interest because it raises the overall cost of providing good service. You may be able to jump to the head of the line by typing in a special code, but that's a little bit like low-grade insurance fraud -- you may not pay the price right now, but everyone around you will pay slightly higher premiums because of your behavior.
It's a little like teaching people to be selfish. I wouldn't argue that people should stay trapped in a poorly designed IVR jail. But I do think there's a preponderance of evidence that most automated systems for self-service are well-designed, follow basic guidelines, and don't cause people to faint out of frustration and despair. We all like to think of ourselves as special, but the sad, hard reality is that most customers, most interactions, are not special. They are average.
Which highlights the other significant problem with the logic of the anti-IVR position: it elevates the outlier to the status of the everyday. An interaction complex enough to require agented assistance is one that should be seen as a special case, one lying on either end of the customer satisfaction bell curve. The normal pathway to an agent, by having some issue too complex or unique to be handled by IVR, ensures that the call center will have the opportunity to flag and parse the complex and unique problem, add it to the knowledge base, and pay special attention to a customer who may need it.
But if everyone is special, then no one is special. If every problem or customer issue is complex and unique, then no problem is. If you take away the call center's ability to triage customer issues into various buckets labeled "critical" and "not so critical" by bailing on every IVR you come across, you create a recipe for broadly mediocre service. Which I suspect is not what Paul English or those who agree with his prescriptions really want.
Keith Dawson is the editorial director for Call Center Magazine. He can be reached at kdawson@cmp.com.
