IVR-to-English Dictionary

• Your call is valuable to us. Please stop bothering us.
• Your call is valuable to us. (Variation for premium rate phone numbers): we make money by keeping you waiting on a premium-rate phone line, and the longer we keep you holding, the more we make.
• We are currently experiencing exceptionally high call volumes. The call centre is open.
• All of our operators are currently dealing with other customers. Neither of our operators is currently available.
• Did you know that you can [long list of things you aren’t calling about] on our website at double-u, double-u, double-u dot ourwebsite dot com? The only good service is self-service.
• One of our agents will be with you as soon as possible. One, Two, Three, Four, make 'em wait outside the door. Five, six, seven, eight, always pays to make 'em wait.
• You may prefer to call back at another time. Preferably, once our lines are closed.
• Please call back later. We’re going to disconnect you right now.
• Please have your account number and password ready. We may have spent millions building this call centre and collecting data about you but don’t think we’re going to figure out your account number from your phone number.
• For security reasons. We have crap IT systems that don’t talk to each other.
• I’ll just need to pop you on hold for a minute. The system is about to drop the call.
• I’ll just transfer you to the right department. Despite making you walk a telephone tree so we know how to direct your call correctly, we misdirected your call and now the system is about to disconnect you.
• I’ll call you right back. I’m going home now.
• Could you just confirm your phone number please? Our crap IT system doesn’t show me the number you’re calling from.
• I’ll just need to take you through security. Our crap IT system handed you off between departments but didn’t pass on information that you’d cleared security.
• Please listen carefully and choose from the following options: I’m now going to list four things you didn’t call about.
• For anything else, type 4. Type 4 for another list of things you aren’t calling about.
• Would you like to hear that list again? I don’t care that none of the options I listed is remotely relevant to your call. You have to pick a number. Take your time. I have all day.
• In your own words, describe why you’re calling. You can say things like “to check my balance” or “to pay a bill”. You can say “to check my balance”, or “to pay a bill”. Of course, I might not understand you if you do. Pro tip: No IVR system in the world understands “I need to speak to a human being.”
• I’m sorry, I didn’t quite get that: could you say it a different way? I already told you, the only things I understand are “to check my balance” and “to pay a bill”.
• You said “to check my balance”. Is that right? I didn’t understand you.
• Your call may be monitored for customer quality and training purposes. The NSA may be recording this call.
• If you prefer, we can keep your place in the queue and call you back when an agent is free. We might or might not call you back. If we do, you might find there’s no agent on the other end. And regardless, you’ll have to type in the same security information you’ve already given us again. And even though we’ll have called you, we will still ask you for your phone number because our crap IT systems won’t show it to the agent.
• Calls to this number from a mobile phone are not free. Just waiting to talk to an agent is going to cost you an arm and a leg.
• You are calling the international access number from a UK phone. Please redial on 0870 XXX XXXX. We’d really like to charge you through the nose for this call, and ensure that you can’t use bundled minutes or all-you-can-eat plans to cover the cost.
• Interactive Voice Response (IVR) System. Customer Alienation System. [Definition from Herb Edelstein of Two Crows]

Bank of Scotland 1, Customer Alienation Systems 0

Today I called Bank of Scotland because my credit card has almost snapped in half.

Here’s what happened:

• I dialled the number on the back of the card.
• After one ring, a human being answered and said “Hello, Bank of Scotland Card Services. How can I help?”
• I explained that my card was damaged.
• He asked for a few details (card number, address, and a couple of other straightforward, reasonable things).
• And then he said: “No problem at all; we’ll get a new card out to you in the next few days.”

Twenty years ago, that would have been normal. Today, it counts as such exceptional telephone customer service that I was moved to blog about it.

How times change.

By way of comparison, earlier this week (on 24th September), when my land line (and therefore internet) had been down 5 days, and I was trying to get better information from BT on a likely fault resolution date than the website was predicting (23rd September, i.e. the previous day), it took me 40 minutes, multiple lies, multiple security interrogations, multiple holds, interminable muzak, endless exhortations to visit bt.com and inordinate frustration before I succeeded in talking to a human being. And when I did, he not only had no information, but didn’t call back, as he promised to do within 15 minutes.

Twenty years ago, that would have been unimaginable. Today, its as common as the constant “exceptionally high call volumes” that seem to characterize modern customer alienation systems.

How to Lose a Customer (Part 1)

Regular readers of this blog will know that the primary focus of The Scientific Marketer is customer analysis as it pertains to marketing. But one of the major themes from that analysis is that marketing surprisingly frequently causes negative effects—sometimes, so negative that it results in the loss of a customer. This reminds us that, valuable though the role of analysis can be, it is ultimately actions that count.

Customer service is hard to get right, but the sheer hamfistedness of much that passes for customer service is breathtaking; this story simply recounts my experience with one company that called me this morning, and an attempt to analyse it from the perspective of customer experience.

The Call¶

This morning, my work was interrupted by a call from a company I placed an order with on 25th January last year (2010). I’ll call the company NorthSouth. A pleasant woman said she was calling because my company, Stochastic Solutions, has an account with NorthSouth and they noticed that I hadn’t used it recently; she wanted to know if there was a reason.

I recognized the company name and knew I had placed exactly one order with NorthSouth. I wasn’t sure what the order had been for, but did remember that I had paid a reasonable amount for next-day delivery, because (funnily enough) I needed it the next day. I also remembered that they had failed to deliver on time. After the call, I looked it up, and the item was a Mac/PC-compatible 2GB 256-bit AES encrypted flash drive made by Kingston (the Data Traveler Vault Privacy Edition). Looking at my diary, it becomes clear that the reason I needed it was that on 27th January I went to a client site, and the security policy I was working under required any drive I used to be encrypted. I now recall that the lack of a suitable encrypted drive was, as expected, a major problem, and caused a lot of time to be lost. In the event, I called up to cancel the order, since the immediate need had passed, but NorthSouth refused and merely agreed to refund the next-day delivery charge. In a further amusing twist, I happened to be preparing paperwork for my accountant the other day and noticed that NorthSouth had actually taken over six months to refund the next-day shipping charge.

Speaking to the person who called this morning, however, I didn’t remember all that. My only recollections were (1) I ordered something I needed with next-day delivery (2) they had failed to deliver on time (3) this had caused me a problem. So my response to “is there a reason?” was along the lines of “Yes. I ordered something from you with next day shipping and you failed to deliver it on time.”

The woman I was talking to sounded surprised, and slightly off balance, but came back with “Won’t you give us a chance to prove we can do better than that?” I declined and she said she’d make some notes on the account so that I don’t keep getting calls.

Analysis¶

The point of this story isn’t to excoriate NorthSouth for their appalling customer service; I have only one data point, and I certainly don’t want to read too much into a single incident. But I think it’s still possible to learn a number of things from this one incident.

My candidate list would be these:

1. Restoration. Mostly, when people (especially businesses) pay for next-day delivery (in this case, increasing the effective price of the item by a third) they don’t do so for the hell of it: they do it either because they need it or because they are impatient. Simply refunding the next-day charge, while clearly the minimum that the supplier can get away with when it fails to supply on time, is unlikely to leave the customer satisfied.
2. The Primacy and the Recency Effect. It is a well known principle of presentations that the most important two parts are the start of the presentation, when you either succeed or fail in hooking your audience (the primacy effect), and the end of the presentation, when you have the opportunity to offer a take-away as their last impression (the recency effect). I tend to argue that customers have long memories, particularly for unexpectedly poor service, but also for unexpectedly good service. But I think the primacy and recency effect are relevant in customer experience too. In this case, my first impression was caused by the failure to deliver on time. My most recent impression (before the call) was that they took a remarkably long time even to provide the inadequate remedy that they offered. In this case, there was probably no reasonable way of winning me back as a customer after screwing up the first order and then handling the aftermath poorly.
3. If you’re going to operate a win-back/reactivation programme, at least look up the customer first. To its credit, NorthSouth clearly has a customer win-back programme, perhaps triggered a year after an order. The woman who called clearly knew at least a tiny-bit about me in the sense that she knew I’d ordered on the internet. This suggests that either she looked up my customer record or (perhaps more likely) was given a list that included at least some information about the order history. But what is equally clear is that she didn’t have all the information that the company has (or should have). Almost certainly, the company has some kind of record of the fact that it screwed up, even if it’s only the credit to the account that was made when they (eventually) refunded the next-day shipping charge. The woman who called could have been much better forearmed or could have saved herself the effort of making the call.

What Could Have Happened?¶

As I say, it’s not clear that, in this case, there’s anything economically worthwhile that the company could have done to win back my business; I think you have to accept that once you’ve screwed up the first order, you’ve probably lost the customer unless you are in some kind of monopoly situation or have such compelling differentiation that the customer might plausibly come back anyway. (The bucket airlines tend to benefit from at least one, and sometimes both of these effects.)

But I will offer a couple of possibilities:

1. Overcompensate. There are lots of reasons for (from the vendors perspective) over-compensating customers when you screw up. I would include in these

   • it emphasizes to the customer that you take the problem seriously;
   • it shows that your claim to ‘care’ extends to being willing to make a financial sacrifice;
   • perhaps most importantly, it creates a clear economic incentive within the company not to screw up;
   • you potentially exceed ths customer’s expectation, thus replacing a negative perception with a more recent positive one. In fact, there’s quite a lot of anecdotal evidence that an exceptionally good response to a mistake can lead to a better customer perception than getting it right in the first place.

2. Whole Customer View. It’s not exactly a radical new insight, but the more connected is your view of the customer, the easier it is to interact appropriately. In this case, if the woman who called had known that NorthSouth failed to deliver on time, she would certainly have been in a better position to discuss reactivation.

3. First purchase. As noted above, the first interaction is particularly important, and if you screw it up, I guess you’ll rarely be given a second chance. If you want to try to undo the damage of a broken first interaction, you’re going to have to work particularly hard and give the customer some plausible reasons to believe that the situation was atypical.

Hypertargeting and Augmented Reality

I ran across this video a few years ago, and hadn't thought about it much since. It's a sort of Brazil meets How to Get Ahead in Advertising meets Blade Runner meets 1984 affair (last link, standards-compliant browsers only).

Over the last week or so, however, I have been targeted relentlessly by a particular company through Google Ads to an extent I have never witnessed before. Despite knowing how it works, I have found it quite discomforting: even watching the video above I get an overlay ad from a company driven to distraction by the fact that I put something in a basket and then didn't complete (because their e-commerce system failed, ironically, and they still haven't told me how I can work round it).

Although I haven't been counting, it feels as if I must be seeing over 50 Google ads a day for this same company, ranging from simple ones advertising discounts to more explicit "YOU HAVEN'T COMPLETED YOUR TRANSACTION!" ads. I feel pursued, slightly harrassed and uncomfortably observed. I could probably avoid it by clearing cookies, or certainly by installing an ad blocker, but I've become morbidly fascinated to see how long it will continue, and whether the ads are going to become even more hysterical.

For me, the negative effect of this aggressive hypertargeting has been that I got so annoyed I went to see if I could buy the item in question elsewhere. In a further irony, I found it on Amazon, where the reviews were so uniformly negative that I decided against purchase. But the key point is that the company in question has moved from one I thought offered pretty good service to one I now feel reluctant to do business with.

An interesting question for me is whether the company's management has any idea how its Google ads are working. I suspect that if they did, they might turn them down a bit. I tried calling them to discuss, but am told by their call centre staff that it is company policy that no one in management ever accepts incoming calls (even from within the business, was the claim). This felt slightly at odds, to me, with a tweet a few days ago from their MD saying "We accept crap service in uk, we shouldn't!", but I guess there are different ways of defining service. Perhaps the company thinks I'll be happy to know how much they want my business.

Give it a couple more days and I expect I'll just install an ad blocker.

If calling a person were like calling a company . . .

If you can't see the film, try visiting http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/8269827

Quickly and Easily

Exceptionally High Call Volumes

IVR Master Control Panel

Some Don'ts for IVR Systems

Printable Version (PDF)

1. Exist

How much do you hate your customers?

The purpose of this article is to try to reduce the pain that interactive voice response (IVR) systems inflict upon the humans. IVR systems, or Customer Alienation Systems, as Herb Edelstein, of Two Crows Consulting1 calls them, are those automated telephone answering systems beloved of banks, utilities, and other companies, that lead us through a tree of menus "in order to help [them] to assist [us] more quickly".

There are many stated justifications for using IVR systems, the bulk of which focus on the (legitimate) desire for businesses to reduce costs, and the more tendentious of which sometimes go as far as to claim actual benefits for customers.

There is no disguising the fact that the starting point for this author is that IVR systems are the problem, and that ideal solution is to replace them with a system based on a more sophisticated components known as human beings.2

So the first "don't" for IVR systems is exist; get this one right and you can ignore the rest of the article.

2. Service the Wrong Number

"I'm afraid you've come through to the wrong number, Sir."

Some problems with IVR start before the customer arrives. One of these is to sit behind so-called "non-geographic" telephone numbers (0845, 0870 etc. in the UK), as increasingly these are some of the most expensive numbers for people to call; obviously, the pain of languishing in IVR hell is heightened by knowing that the experience is costing you an arm and a leg.

The other sense in which an IVR system can sit behind the wrong phone number is for its number to be given out in inappropriate contexts. The most egregious such error arises when calling the most prominent number on a letter, email or website takes you through to a system that isn't suitable for calls directly related to the matter on said letter, email or website.

3. Waste Time

Welcome to The Scientific Marketer ("the world's most cantankerous marketing website") and THANK YOU for calling. The Scientific Marketer always remembers that YOU have a CHOICE and could just as easily get your marketing advice elsewhere. Please listen carefully to ALL of the following options before making your selection and please note that menus have changed.

4. Lie

"Your call is important to us."

Yes, we've installed a customer alienation system, which might unwittingly give the impression that we care nothing about your time and aren't prepared to offer you the access to a human being you crave without first putting you through confusing and labrynthine menus and indeterminate waits, and generally trying to get you off the phone before an operator becomes available, but—contrary to all evidence—your call is important to us.

"We are currently experiencing unusually high call volumes."

Unusual. a. 1582. Not often occurring or observed, different from what is usual; out of the common, remarkable, exceptional.
   —The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

Tornados in England are unusual; several customers calling a call centre at lunchtime is not unusual.

"Did you know that we have a dedicated easy-to-use website at double-u double-u double-u dot sci-en-ti-fic-mar-ket-er dot com that allows you to do nearly everything that you can do at the call centre with no queuing and no outrageous non-geographic telephone charges? At the Scientific Marketer website you can read articles, leave comments, read other users' comments, report problems, learn how administer control groups, book an expert one-to-one consultation with our highly trained expert marketing professional—in fact, almost all the things you'd expect to be able to do at a website (Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or Netscape Navigator 4.1 required)."

People who have current web access and like using the web have already tried that; people braving IVR hell either don't use the web, don't have access to the web at this time, don't want to do this particular transaction on the web or have already tried and failed on the web. One of the few things more annoying than failing to achieve something on the web is sitting in IVR hell for a while, giving up and going back and trying it on the web one more time, discovering that (as you thought) it doesn't work on the web, and then going back into IVR hell at the back of the queue, only to be lectured on how much better life could be on the web.

5. Run Security Checks too Early

"I just need to know whether your call centre will be open on Sunday."

It's alright. You can tell me that. Even if I don't know my PIN.

6. Forget

"Now, could I just begin by taking a few security details from you."

"But I just spent the first half of my morning telling your computer those exact same things."

"Ah yes, Sir, but we don't have access to that system here. Now, if you could just tell me the name of your great grandmother's first boyfriend . . ."

7. Deafen Your Customers

"Don't Keep Me Hanging on the Telephone."
   —Blondie.

There is a problem with cavernous silence on a telephone line; customers tend to think that they've been cut off. It used to be that the solution to this was to present comfort tones—a soft beep, every few seconds, just to let the customer know that (s)he hasn't been cut off. Unfortuately, comfort tones become annoying fairly quickly and suggest to a minority of customers that they have been cut off. So it is now more common to play music at them.

There are several problems with this. One is volume, which commonly seems signficantly above "comfortable". Another is the paradox of selection: you want neither something people dislike (obviously) nor something they like (less obviously) because there is no such thing as music that sounds reasonable over a tinny, distorted, noisy phone line, and people especially don't want music they actually like murdered in this way. So the music is wrong for most people most of the time.

There is no solution based on making a better choice.3

8. Keep Customers in the Dark

"There are 5 customers ahead of you in the queue."

"Most calls at your current position in the queue are answered within 5 minutes."

There is no excuse for leaving customers in the dark about how long they are likely to have to wait. Allowing them to see their progression along the queue, and giving them the best possible information about how much longer they are likely to have to wait is extremely helpful.

The goal, of course, is to underpromise and over-deliver: people rarely complain about a call being answered sooner than an estimate. I've worded the second piece of information quite carefully: "most calls from your current position in the queue are answered within 5 minutes". The trick here is that you can be accurate (which is important) but also conservative. Interpret "most" not optimistically (at just over 50 per cent) but pessimistically (say at 90% or 95%). You don't want to be so pessimistic that you drive people away needlessly4, but you do want to deliver on your promise in the vast bulk of cases.

9. Put Your Customers on Hold

"I'm just going to have to put you on hold for a second, Sir"

No doubt there are times when customers absolutely have to be put on hold. Try to design these out. Customers hate it. Calls get mysteriously dropped by the system. Customer's give up. They get subjected to more muzak. They get more frustrated.

Recognize that having to put a customer on hold is a failure.

10. Drop Your Customers Calls

[disconnected tone, usually after long wait]

I've personally never been sure whether random disconnection is an approach to call volume management or simply a sign of low-quality systems; however, calls to call centres do seem to get dropped more than almost any other kind of (non-mobile) call.

11. Exploit Queuing Users

"Did you know about the range of great marketing advice freely available from the Scientific Marketer? For substantially less than the cost of a mailshot we could advise you not to bother. Or why not check out our great range of white papers on retention, freely available at double-u double-u double-u dot sci-en-ti-fic-mar-ket-er dot com forward-slash retentionWhitePapers dot html (remember to use a capital W in White and capital P in Papers; registration required.5) Do you really understand . . .?

12. Use Voice Recognition

"I'm now going to ask you to answer a few simple questions. Please answer by speaking in your normal voice. For example, if your name is Nick Radcliffe, please say `Nick Radcliffe', in your normal voice, at your normal speed, without touching your telephone keypad. Now, please state your join date in the form day, month, year. [pause] Please speak after the tone. [pause] [beep]

"Thirty March Two Thousand and Four,"

"I'm sorry, I didn't quite get that. Please answer by speaking in your normal voice at your normal speed, without touching your telephone keypad. Now, please try again. State your join date in the form day, month, year. [pause] Please speak after the tone. [pause] [beep]

"Thirty March Two Thousand and Four."

"I think you said [pause] Thirteenth March Two Thousand and Four. [pause] If that is correct, please say `yes'. If that is incorrect, please say `no'. [pause] Please speak after the tone. [pause] [beep]

[Sound of customer pulling out fingernails.]

One day, voice recognition systems might be able to understand human speech significantly better than other human beings.6

Today is not that day.

13. Use Hierarchies or Dead Ends

If you are calling to congratulate the Scientific Marketer on its new IVR system, press one. If you are calling to tell the Scientific Marketer that you love its new IVR system more than life itself, press two. Please make your selection now.

Not all calls fit into your predefined menu structure. Given a choice between A, B, C and D, some customers will call about A and B, and some will call about E. (Unless D is "anything else", E always exists.) So the first labrynth problem is dead ends: you have to cater for the user who doesn't fit your categories neatly.

The usual fallback is to add for all other enquiries, press 5. In the context of IVR systems, this is good practice, provided that 5 directs the caller to a human. The bad dream turns into a nightmare when pressing 5 takes the user to another menu.

IVR menus bad. Hierarchical IVR menus, doubleplusbad.

Footnotes

1 http://www.twocrows.com/ ↩

2 with IVR system acting possibly as a backup to deal with rare cases of genuinely "exceptional call volumes". ↩

3 or worse, putting the customer into a new IVR menu to select music} The only solution is to avoid making customers dangle on phone lines. ↩

4 No, you really don't . . . ↩

5 In reality, of course, registration is not required for papers from The Scientific Marketer. ↩

6 They will have to be much better than human beings to compensate for all the ways in which they are worse. ↩

Do Computers Dream of Electronic Forgiveness?

Kafka

Rate Plan

41 Timeless Ways to Screw Up Direct Marketing

Screw Up the Control Groups

1. Don't keep a control group
2. Make the control group so small as to be useless
3. Raid the controls to make up campaign numbers
4. Use deadbeats as controls
5. Don't make the controls random
6. Use Treatment Controls but not Targeting Controls

Alienate or Annoy the Customer

7. Trigger defection with retention activity
8. Use intrusive contact mechanisms
9. Use inappropriate or niche creative content
10. Insult or patronize the Customer
11. Mislead or disappint the Customer
12. Fail to Listen to the Customer
    • Bonus marks for refusing to take "no" for an answer
    • Double bonus marks for calling the customer back after she's said "No thanks, I'm not interested" and hung up.
13. Overcommunicate
14. Make it hard for the Customer to do what you want.
    • (Overloaded websites, uncooperative web forms, understaffed call centres, uninformed staff and failure to carry stock to meet demand are but a few of the ways to achieve this).
15. Intrude on the Customer's Privacy
16. (Over)exploit the customer

Misinterpret the Data

17. Confuse "responses" with "incremental responses" (uplift)
18. Confuse revenue with net revenue
19. Take Credit for That Which Would have Happened Anyway
20. Double Count
21. Believe the name of a cluster means something
22. Believe the data
    • The fact that the computer says it's true and prints it prettily, doesn't mean it is.
23. Disbelieve the data
    • The fact that the data doesn't show what you hoped, thought or expected doesn't mean it isn't so.

Screw Up Campaign Execution

24. Discard response information.
25. Revel in unintended discounts and incentives
26. Use dangerous, insulting or disrespectful labels
    • Yes, I really have known an airline label its bottom-tier frequent fliers "scum class", and a retailer label a segment of its customer "vindaloonies".
27. Ship mailings with the internal fields filled in instead of external ones (see also 26)
    • Dear ScumClass, . . .
28. Direct people to slow, hard-to-navigate websites, IVR Systems or overloaded or poorly designed call centres
29. Fail to inform your front-line staff about offers you're sending to customers
30. Fail to ensure your company can fulfill what the marketing promises
31. Use a name that's very visually similar to a better known name that has negative connotations for many people.
    • I frequently get mail from Communisis, but I never read their name correctly.

Mismodel or Misplan the Campaign:

32. Confuse statistical accuracy/excellence with ability to make money
33. Model the wrong thing
34. Use undirected modelling instead of directed modelling
35. Assume equivalence of campaigns when important things have changed.
36. Ignore external factors (seasonality, competitor behaviour etc.)
37. Fail to make dates relative
38. Contaminate the training data with validation data
39. Screw up the Observation Window (Predict the Past, not the Future)
40. Ignore changes in the meaning of data
41. Fail to sanity check anything and everything

Suspicion

Demand Suppression

Rejection

It Takes a Computer . . .

Customer Alienation Systems

It was Herb Edelstein who, as far as I know, first argued that IVR systems ("Interactive Voice Response") should more properly be known as Customer Alienation Systems.

He's not wrong.