Adaptive and Relationship-Building Self-Service
Adaptive and Relationship-Building Self-Service by Jason Andersson
Is it possible that self-service applications, such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR) solutions are looking at a slow painful death because of lack of innovation? And I don’t mean that vendors have stopped inventing, really I don’t. But the usage of these solutions is quite unimaginative. I think the time has come to rethink how companies use their IVR solutions and turn them into relationship-building self-service tools.
Self-service stand-still
Most contact centers I work with use some type of IVR to greet customers. Some have a self-service option for those who want to use it. The vast majority of solutions are based on how the company is organized and how they want to sort customers calling into the customer care center. It can be that they want to sort them by what they are going to do; buy something ask for information, or request service or support. We then simply ask them to press a key, or say a word and we will route based on that.
Some contact centers use the IVR to look into databases giving the customer access to a wealth of information, such as financial statements, service ticket updates, book appointments, cancel planned meetings, order products, cancel shipments, pay bills, or transfer funds. You can probably list a number of more services.
Most of these solutions are designed, and only change if the company changes its services, or need to rerecord prompts and so on. They are never adjusted, dynamically to the customer. They are static solutions.
Dynamic customer experiences
Imagine you going into a grocery store. You know where everything is, you find your cereals, your canned goods, meets, fish, vegetables and so on. Now imagine that the store reinvents itself based on your needs. A fast route when you are in a hurry, where you can pick up what you need faster, or a route with lots of testing stations so you can get inspired for this weekends dinner.
This is hard to do in a physical store, but on the Internet, this happens all the time. The store adjusts its offering based on who you are, what you have bought before and other things the company knows about you. On the phone? Equally easy, but most of the time, never implemented.
I worked with a company who had a very dynamic website, but their contact center solution was tragically static. I proposed a solution where customers could adjust their telephony experience based on their Internet habits, and let the customer choose who to experience dynamic phone services. It was a new thought for them, and it forced the web people to talk to the phone people, and brainstorm ideas. But the end result was magnificent.
Most self-service solutions can become adaptive by understanding the needs of the customer, and investigating habits. A customer, who calls into a system several times a week, would love to have fewer pauses in the prompts, to faster move through the system. They would even be able to enter the right menu options even without hearing the prompts. Even allowing customers who call often for a service to choose a more custom menu based on previous calls would be appreciated. Dynamic scripts use historic records of usage in combination with data from other sources to present new or simplified options to customers contacting a service. This could be an adaptable menu that removes options that for one customer is irrelevant based on previous customer choices, or prompt languages based on from where the customer is contacting.
But remember to always give the customer the choice, and an option to go back to the old way of working.
Too few customers consider co-creating self-service solutions with their customers. They can help you to do it better, service them better. This will turn them into your fan base, and they will in turn tell others how well you listen to their needs. In a fiercely competitive market, service design concepts are more important than ever. In many instances, copying what someone else does well has replaced innovation. This has given rise to a new concept of service design that leads organizations to design and deliver service based on collaborative methods to beat seemingly identical competitors. In This is Service Design Thinking, a book by Marc Stickdorn, Jakob Schneider and other co-authors, they demonstrate a model for “[…] entrepreneurs and innovators in the field of services.” (Stickdorn, Schneider, & etc, 2011) They look at service design as an inter-disciplinary approach, which is a user centric, co-creative and dynamic process that can be measured, proven, and has a holistic viewpoint.