Comments on: *** Listen Up! (VRU Optimization)

By: Charles King

Charles King — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 23:22:45 +0000

This is a neat story! It seems likely that your demographic was uniquely open to the humanizing of the IVR. Most people are much more concerned with the amount of time it takes to get what the need and the initial assurance that they will get what they need quickly from the IVR.

http://www.charleskingconsulting.com (IVR for Microsoft Visual Studio)

By: Jim Novo

Jim Novo — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 17:28:02 +0000

For those interested in reading further about Marketing and IVR, David offers these 3 blog posts: Viral IVR Campaign Email + IVR Integrated Campaign IVR / CRM integration

By: Jim Novo

Jim Novo — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 16:58:26 +0000

David, thanks for expanding this idea on the technical side, worth the read for the historical perspective alone!

Both the Marketing and Technical skill sets together really are required to optimize these systems. Here’s an example from Tootie:

The original VRU opened up with “Enter the item number”. That’s a pretty logical thought on the engineering side; after all, it’s an order-taking interface. But as a Marketing person, I understood the behavior of the customer. First, I thought that most all orders would be placed for the item on screen. Second, I thought it was possible many folks would not have a phone in the same room as the TV (this was 1991 and cordless phones were not a big deal yet). So they would have trouble accessing the item number and this could supress buying impulse.

So I asked the engineers, “Do we know what percentage of orders are for items not currently on the TV screen?” Sure. Answer: 1%

Knowing many of our systems were keyed to current item being sold, I asked, “Can we have the VRU look for current item and just speak it to the customer?” And of course, the answer was yes, that would be easy. I also wanted the VRU to be a bit friendlier, which was also easy enough.

So the new open became: “Hi, this is Tootie! I’m currently taking orders for the (product name). Press One to order this item or press two to order a different item”.

That simple change reduced the “bounce rate” at the initial open by 90%. You see the same kinds of dramatic changes in web site optimization, where a very simple change in the logic flow creates huge improvements in conversion rate.

Engineers and Marketers should get together more often…

By: IVR Blog by Angel.com

IVR Blog by Angel.com — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 14:50:55 +0000

[...] I just read a nice post on the Marketing Productivity Blog on a topic I/we’ve known for quite some time, but probably never put into words. To summarize, here’s a snippet from that post… Fact is, an IVR is a technical interface to humans, just like a web site is. And just like many web sites, it was probably built and programmed by some engineers without a lot of direction from Marketing or Customer Service. There’s really no reason at all why the folks optimizing the web site should not also optimize the phone system too – especially if they do a good job with the web site! [...]