How do you ensure you aren’t frustrating customers with poorly designed IVR systems and chatbots? Before we provide four key guidelines, let’s begin by addressing some foundational recommendations that are critical when developing, implementing and refining self-service strategies.
You can find these insights by gathering and analyzing customer interaction, feedback and sentiment data. Next, create a service blueprint of your most important service journeys. The powerful combination of customer experience data and service blueprints enables you to identify the drivers of customer contact, effort, and frustration in addition to poor service designs.
Know your customer’s needs. It is essential to rely on current data when making design decisions about IVR, chatbots and service journeys. These decisions require more than extensive customer experience or industry knowledge. People change, and so do your customer’s wants and needs. Being in sync with those changes is critical to reaping the cost-savings benefits of IVR systems, chatbots and other customer-facing technologies.
As such, wise CX leaders will evaluate performance, develop/refine strategies, and design and improve services based on continuously refreshed customer experience knowledge.
Finally, keep in mind the two overriding goals of any customer support service journey — to resolve customer needs and do so with the least amount of effort possible. This knowledge will equip you and your team when revisiting your IVR and chatbot design.
COPC® Service Journey Thinking offers a holistic approach to visualizing, designing and measuring the customer journey. Organizations can create a more personalized, streamlined customer experience with service blueprinting and better data usage.
COPC® Service Journey Thinking
There are many proven guidelines for the successful design and performance of IVR systems, chatbots and other self-service models of customer care. Here are just a few that COPC uses to help our clients:
1. Access and Delivery of Core Services
Designing a valuable IVR or chatbot experience means providing services with at least the core capabilities to easily and quickly address customer needs. To be clear, ‘triaging’ is not a customer need; but a business need.
2. Simple and Engaging Design
People are drawn to and get more engaged in activities or tasks they are confident they can manage and enjoy. Most tend to avoid activities that exceed their level of competence or that they do not like.
Your customers are no different. They are more motivated to engage with and regularly use IVR and chatbots when these technologies deploy a simple, pleasant, and appealing design and do not require expertise or extensive patience.
Customers want to state their needs or preferences only once. They want quick answers to simple inquiries and expert guidance when navigating more complex issues.
3. Quality and Accuracy
The experience with your IVR or chatbot and the outcome of each customer interaction should be defect free. The system should be intelligent and agile enough to allow customers to easily recover from input errors. Customers should never encounter ‘dead ends’ in their experience with an IVR or chatbot.
Furthermore, resolution within these channels should be highly accurate. When customers contact you, they expect a solution. Therefore, these technologies should not require additional customer effort, repeat contacts, or escalation. Frustrating experiences with an IVR or chatbot affect customer sentiment regarding their immediate need and negatively impact customer loyalty in the future.
Ten percent of customer interactions began in self-service, but only 4% finished in self-service. Where do the other customers go, you might ask? Research shows they’re either taking their concern to a human-assisted channel or quitting your brand altogether.
Global Benchmarking Series | Contact Center Channel Management
There are other strategies and guidelines that can help transform your IVR and chatbot from something customers dread or avoid to preferred channels that serve as a competitive advantage and drive higher margins. However, these guidelines are a good starting place to spark your CX transformation!
To learn more about service design best practices and how to drive higher customer loyalty while lowering business costs, contact us to speak with a COPC CX expert or check out our Service Journey Thinking training course.