Is your telephone system damaging your CSAT rating?
We’ve all been there… You call up a company that provides services such as utilities, financial, broadband and mobile or some other type of facility that we depend on for business or personal use. We need to speak to customer service, we need it to be quick because it should be simple and we haven’t got all day.
We just need to get through and talk to someone… and we are met by a souped up answering machine, an automated answering system that asks us to press numbers to select options or asks us to respond verbally. It’s not unusual to go through several levels of voice prompts’. And then what happens?
We find ourselves in a queue! Sometimes it’s of indeterminate length, because not every system provides useful info such as what number you may happen to be in the queue, or how long the average wait time is before your call gets picked up by a human.
Companies often have multiple levels of voice prompts because they want to qualify each call and elicit as much information as possible before directing the call through. Some even push customers away to use internet self-service on their websites.
Whatever their reasons, this is often clearly a source of great frustration for callers. It makes for a poor customer experience and it can really hit the CSAT rating.
How to achieve human responses to calls in less than 10 seconds
But it doesn’t have to be like that. To those familiar with it, the expression ‘Sub 10’, is likely to conjure up images of track stars like the great Usain Bolt wowing sports fans around the world with blistering performances in the 100m.
However, the concept of ‘in less than 10 seconds’ can be applied to many things, including companies that can pick up every customer call and guarantee a human response in an average time of less than 10 seconds!
To achieve this, it’s a combination of two things:
- An appropriate VoIP system
- The use of IVR best practice
The right VoIP system
The most appropriate VoIP systems should have IVR that provides for a wide range of configuration settings, allowing you to customise the answering process to your precise requirements.
Goldfish.ie VoIP telephone systems provide excellent IVR capabilities because we have refined the design and development of them in-house. We call our IVR feature Call Director.
Some typical benefits of Call Director include:
- Professional standard or customised recorded voice prompts
- Get customers to who they need to talk with faster
- Complete control over the number of levels of voice prompts
IVR best practice
There are a number of best practice guidelines to help businesses optimise their IVR process. One rule of thumb is to limit main menu options to 30 seconds. However, that doesn’t work, especially if there are subsequent levels of voice prompts.
Our advice is to keep the main menu really simple and once each caller has selected their option, direct them straight through to the relevant department or any other employee that is free to pick up:
1… for Sales
2… for Support
3… for Accounts
4… for Anything else
And that’s it!
Keeping it straightforward prevents annoying customers with a drawn out IVR navigation process, a long initial period of being on hold listening to marketing messages or annoying elevator muzak, or repeating themselves to a machine and then to a human. Keep it ‘Sub 10’ and boost your CSAT rating!
Ready to go VoIP with Goldfish.ie?
A good way to prepare to go VoIP is to get some market intelligence. Simply click here to download: The Buyers’ Guide to VoIP Business Telephony Solutions.
And when you are ready to switch, you can sign up and get started right away with Goldfish.ie VoIP solution.
Questions? Just call us on 01 554 7888 (option 2 – it’s best practice IVR!) or contact us
