The Oft Forgotten Phone Channel

Try this: go to any shopping mall and take a good look around. Look at the storefronts, the carefully arranged displays, the beautiful people hawking perfumes. A visual feast of delights to assault your senses and make you a true believer… in the brand.

Then call the 800 numbers for these same companies and that’s usually when the needle scratches off the record.

Companies obsess over maximizing the value of every customer touch point and yet, most of them miss the opportunity to engage their customers on a brand level through the phone channel. I would go one step further and say a large portion of these companies have 800 numbers that actual repel customers. The Website Touchtone Hell chronicles some of the most repellent 800 numbers around.

According to a recent article by the Service & Support Professionals Association (SSPA), more than half of support issues are initiated by phone. So, it’s hard to believe companies would intentionally ignore the phone channel. And yet, most callers are still tortured by long hold times, confusing touch-tone menus and repeatedly told to visit a company’s website.

But alas, a glimmer of hope: A handful of companies have figured it out. Companies like American Airlines, Apple and USAA are actually extending their brands through the phone channel with personalized and often proactive service. For example, with the American Airlines ‘Know Me’ program (see my June 21st comment), the company knows who the caller is and why they’re calling, before they ever speak a word.

In a world where touch-tone hell is still the norm, it’s refreshing when you actually do business with a company that has customer service continuity, whether that service is provided at the ticket counter, on the jet way, or by phone. There are a ton of retail and other companies who would do well to follow the American Airlines lead and invest as much in telephone self-service as they do on storefronts.

Every now and then, I get to work on really great speech-enabled IVR systems, that even callers like to use. Recently, I learned from Telecom New Zealand, the major telephone carrier in a country of about 4 million people, that their callers really like their new system.

Today, Telecom New Zealand provides millions of subscribers with local dial tone, plus long distance service, plus Internet service, plus mobile services, plus a variety of other value-added services.

So it stands to reason, their subscribers are calling for a myriad of product offerings and for a multitude of reasons.

After adding more and more items to their touch-tone system, they started to get the feeling that their touch-tone menu system just wasn’t cutting it anymore.

So, how did they handle this problem? They implemented a conversational call routing speech system. The results were really stunning:

• The number of callers that “zero out” dropped to almost nothing
• Customer satisfaction with speech is three times greater than with the old touch-tone IVR
• Huge jump in CSR efficiency due to reduced re-work and misroutes

Here is an interesting article that appeared on Destination CRM, entitled Chatting Up Customers Down Under.