Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology is a widely used, highly effective means of automating customer contact services. It is a game changer for call centers, freeing up human agents by routing and deflecting calls, providing recorded responses to FAQs, and even providing account information and accepting payments.
IVRs have one major flaw though, people don’t like them!
So what can we do about that?
The problem, as we see it, is not the IVR technology itself but its implementation. If an IVR is badly designed, outdated, or too complex callers will drop off. It’s inevitable. Callers look to your service for support, when they are met with obstacles instead of the assistance they need, they are going to look elsewhere. This is where IVR performance testing comes in.
By implementing robust, continuous IVR testing strategies that facilitate a better understanding of your customers’ experience with your service, and are capable of evolving to meet changing needs and infrastructural conditions, you will ensure that CX is always at the core of your IVR functionality.
Let’s take a look at these IVR testing strategies.
1. Walk in your customers’ shoes
Customers want differentiated experiences. They don’t want a generic, cookie-cutter service, they want to feel that you get them. Your IVR technology has a big responsibility, it has to convey an almost human-level empathetic understanding of your customers before they ever speak to a human.
To deliver this level of responsive, insightful IVR service you must try to understand your customers’ experience with your service.
Unfortunately, the people who build IVRs are not always best placed to test their CX efficacy; they’re just too close to them, and more often than not, have a much higher level of technical proficiency than your customers.
Automated IVR performance testing provides that objective, indisputable evidence of CX functionality in IVR technologies. By letting an automated IVR testing tool, like Spearline’s IVR tester, trawl through your IVR for you, you will understand the bottlenecks and difficulties as your caller experiences them, and be better positioned to make the improvements necessary to deliver the type of personalized experiences your customers are seeking.
2. Stay frosty
You’re delivering a thoughtfully designed, customer-centric IVR. Job done. Nope! Sorry to have to tell you but you’re going to have to stay frosty when it comes to your IVR and its implementation. Testing it once and setting it loose won’t suffice.
As your business grows, so too does the complexity of your IVR. Changes and additions to your product/service options and integrations mean new routing considerations, alterations to your menus, and amendments and additions to existing messaging.
Add in new, more complex technologies and you are now dealing with a much more intricate IVR environment, one that will prove next to impossible to test manually with any kind of satisfactory cadence.
Automated IVR performance testing facilitates the deep dive examinations that complex, growing IVR systems require. Scalable, repeatable, proactive IVR testing lets you manage complexity such that it doesn’t affect your customers’ experience with your service.
3. Make a map
Comprehensive IVR maps are essential to a complete understanding of your IVR as it stands right now and to visualize what it might become in the future. Framing your IVR in a manner that illustrates every pathway, every possible interaction route helps teams to collaborate better and lays the groundwork for any changes and updates to optimize CX.
Creating IVR maps manually, however, is a long and arduous task.
Our IVR mapping process initiates automated calls that travel every possible call journey and reach every possible endpoint, providing you with a comprehensive map of your customers’ call flows through your entire IVR.
Not just that, our IVR testing tool captures and transcribes each audio prompt played at every stage of the call journey and presents these recordings on a personalized dashboard.
Mapping insights like these helps you to identify and isolate anomalies and allows you to make smarter decisions regarding IVR improvements and migrations, that benefit customer experiences.
4. Be everywhere, all at once
Your customers are spread out, in disparate locations, in disparate time zones. Your IVR testing process needs to be mindful of that reality. You need a testing tool capable of working to your schedule and to your geographic specifications. It must be where you are and at the times you need it the most.
With a global network across over 80 countries, Spearline’s IVR performance testing tool can provide those essential insights. Schedule your tests for known times of peak demand, inside and outside of ‘regular’ work hours. Check that your localization options are operable and still appropriate and that your call routing functionality is optimal throughout the day and night.
5. Break down those walls
Your IVR testing tool will help you to spot any impediments to CX success, now all you have to do is remove them.
One of the most common barriers to CX success is the Information silo. Use your IVR performance test insights to examine how best your teams could cooperate with one another. Look at ways to eliminate silos between IT teams and sales or agent teams, for example. Breaking down these obstacles will hasten the flow of vital information and learning and ultimately benefit CX.
Conclusion
The war for customer mindshare will be won on the battlefield of customer experience, and your IVR is on the frontline.
Using the IVR testing strategies we have discussed, you will have a deeper, more empathetic understanding of your customers’ experience with your service and a heightened awareness of the best course to chart for growth. By implementing these simple strategies, you are on target to provide the differentiated customer experiences your customers demand.
Why not reach out to us today to find out how our IVR testing tool can raise your CX game?
New to Spearline?
Spearline provides quality assurance tools for business communication services, allowing you to proactively manage your inbound and outbound voice, SMS and fax services. Our latest WebRTC products offer testing, monitoring and support for web-based communications.
We work globally across business sectors, supporting contact centers, conferencing services, and more to successfully connect with their customers and employees. For further information, or if you have any further questions please get in touch.
