Recently I was talking to an acquaintance about our top IVR annoyances. While we debated back and forth on the merit of each annoyances it got me thinking about the current wave around customer experience, customer journey, and the amount of money and products some companies are putting in to try and get marginal improvements. While I’ve been working in the contact center for over a decade, I certainly don’t know it all, but I’ve come to realize that before spending a lot of money businesses should do a few small things. These small things will provide small improvements and will set you up to be better prepared for bringing some vendor to help you “revolutionize” your customer experience.

Now there is no data to backup these thoughts, but I like to think my experience should carry a bit of weight. Here we go:

Your IVR should reflect your personality. Every IVR sounds the same, is your business just like every other business? All businesses stress over print ads, color schemes for the website, logos, commercials, but their IVR still feels like every other IVR. Why not carry that stress over to something which can be personalized with just a few words and voice inflection?

Know your callers. We find ourselves in a data rich and information poor world. Are your callers millennials? Are they senior citizens? Is there a specific social economic status which gravitates towards your IVR while others go through a different channel?  All of this information is critical in trying to figure out what options you should be offering in your IVR and what your personality should be.

Make it sound fresh. Has your IVR welcomed every caller with “Thank you for calling…” since the dawn of time? Every modern and not so modern IVR in the world can play an array of greetings, use slightly different language depending on the time of year, and create some personalization without much work. No one likes to talk to that one person who always tells the same stories. Your IVR can easily and cheaply break that monotony, sound fresh, and make the wait seem more engaging.

Don’t make me tell you again. One of the things that’s most annoying is when you call a company to fix a problem, you think it’s solved only to find out a few hours later or a few days later that it’s not resolved. You know what I do, and the rest of the world does? Call right back. It’s very easy for modern IVRs to see that a customer called recently and there’s a very high likelihood they are calling for the same reason again. So why put them through your self-service menu? Get them immediately to an agent, you failed at first call resolution, you know it and they know. Here’s a second shot at making it better. Extra points if you get them to the same agent who will have some context from the first call.

Everyone likes surprises. Every once in a while, have calls be sent to agents without having to go through the full gamut of the IVR. Specially if you know you have agents available. which will increase your agent utilization, but this only works if your agents are able to handle most types of calls. Because if you’re going to have to transfer callers, do not do this!

Don’t pretend to care. Saying that my call is important is such an insult. It’s not, otherwise you would have staffed accordingly and not made me wait. Offer a way to call back a customer instead of having them wait hostage to your queue treatment.

Silence is golden.  If your call center deals with extremely high hold times greater than 15 minutes. Give the caller the option to not hear any music and announcements at all. An occasional beep and maybe a short message on how to enable music again will make the wait time much more enjoyable. If I can detect how often your music on hold loops, I will not be very pleasant when the agent takes my call.

~david

Interesting little issue I ran into when trying to create a new datastore in my ESXi server. I had to use NFS v2/v3 even though the ESXi documention states v4 is supported. Here are my specs:

– QNAP TS-219P II 4.3.3.0404

– VMWare ESXi v6.0.0 Build 5050593

To configure the NFS share in the NAS. Control Panel > Win/MAC/NFS > NFS Service

To ensure your share has NFS partitions click on the link that says “Click here to set the NFS access…” Choose your shared folder and Edit Shared Folder Permissions. And click

In ESXi, click on the host server. Configuration > Storage > Add Storage…

1. Network File System

2. Server IP, Folder, Datastore Name

3. Finish

When done, you should see your NAS as a data store.

~david

Here are my notes on how to install these components.

sudo apt-get install php7.0-mbstring php7.0-xml composer unzip
sudo apt-get install -y php7.0 php7.0-fpm php7.0-mysql php7.0-zip php7.0-gd
sudo apt-get install mcrypt php7.0-mcrypt
sudo apt-get install -y php7.0-mbstring php7.0-xml –force-yes
sudo apt-get install php7.0-curl php7.0-json
sudo vi /etc/php/7.0/fpm/php.ini
    cgi.fix_pathinfo=0
sudo service php7.0-fpm restart
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/laravel
sudo vi /etc/nginx/sites-available/default
server {
        listen 80;
        listen [::]:80 ipv6only=on;

        root /var/www/laravel/public;
        index index.php index.html index.htm;

        # Make site accessible from http://localhost/
        server_name <serverName>;

        location / {
                # First attempt to serve request as file, then
                # as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404.
                try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
                # Uncomment to enable naxsi on this location
                # include /etc/nginx/naxsi.rules
        }
        location ~ \.php$ {
                try_files $uri =404;
                fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
                fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock;
                fastcgi_index index.php;
                fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
                include fastcgi_params;
        }
}
cd ~
curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer
sudo composer create-project laravel/laravel /var/www/laravel
sudo chown -R :www-data /var/www/laravel
sudo chmod -R 775 /var/www/laravel/storage
sudo chmod -R guo+w storage
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mysql-server
sudo mysql_secure_installation