Frequently Asked Questions

1. •What can the IVR Doctors do for us?
   
   

The IVR Doctors have proven that they can help save money and improve automated phone system performance and utilization without decreasing, and often improving, customer satisfaction with the overall IVR/ASR experience.

We are steeped in best-in-class design principles and will bring more than 25 years of successful menu, scripting, and call flow analysis and design experience to your IVR/ASR to help solve system-wide or application-specific problems.

1. •Which technology is best for our system --  touch tone, speech or a combination?
   

There is no right answer to that question; both technologies offer unique benefits to callers and unique challenges for system managers.  We neither provide nor favor one technology over the other.

In making your decision, we can help you to consider your company’s customer care philosophy, vendor relationship(s), application complexity, prior experience with automated telephone system, and internal and external system feedback.

Remember that both modalities can work successfully, either separately or together. We will be happy to share our experience with you on this subject.

1. •What is an IVR Workshop?
   

Our IVR Workshops are hands-on sessions with your cross-department or multi-function IVR/ASR management team, typically take a day and a half, and are held offsite to minimize distractions. Building on our extensive pre-workshop analysis of your menus and call flows, we work with your team to deconstruct and reconstruct your Main Menu and menus that flow from it.

The collaborative give and take, as we review our recommendations based on best-in-class design fundamentals, is a key workshop deliverable, as your IVR/ASR team gets familiar with design rationale and becomes trained for future analysis themselves, in house. Further, you will leave the workshop with new menus, scripts, and call flows that have been based both on design theory and your system reality and philosophy.

1. •What is an IVR Usability Test?
   

This is a one-on-one diagnostic customer test of proposed or live system menus and/or applications. Customers are presented with a common task and then experience the proposed or live system as they attempt to complete it. The IVR Doctors will focus not only on whether the caller completed the task, but also on the critical element of how he or she felt about it while doing it.

Typically, 3-5 different system tests can be performed by each of 12 recruited participants.

“Wizard of Oz” test: For testing menus not yet in production, the IVR Doctors will remove the programming cost and time burden from your IT department or vendor, reproducing the menus themselves in sort order and at a significant cost savings to you.

1. •How are your IVR Focus Groups different from traditional focus groups?
   
   

While IVR focus groups may seem like traditional focus groups, there are significant differences. The IVR Doctors use a proven methodology to minimize or eliminate biased, individual user experience with your system and menus from becoming the basis for group discussion, so that ‘bandwagon effect’ behavior doesn't take over and produce homogenized results.

In addition, the entire group will focus on specific menu wording and/or wording alternatives to fine tune final production menus or, when used with live systems, to revise poorly performing applications or call flows.

1. •Do we have to sign up for an IVR Workshop and a Usability Test or Focus Groups all at once?
   

No. While customers are the ultimate judge of your system’s success, these three IVR Doctor offerings are individual and standalone.

The IVR Workshop is often the most productive place to start, however, bringing your IVR/ASR management team together and helping everyone understand best-in-class design principles, as the team becomes trained for future work in-house.

Usability tests are valuable whether pre- or post- system launch or change, as are focus groups, but each test type has plusses and minuses we can discuss, depending on your specific circumstances.

1. •Do you favor any vendor or vendor association?
   

We are not connected with any vendor or any vendor association, remaining neutral on the whole matter of what vendor and what type of automated system you consider or select.

1. •What makes the IVR Doctors stand out from other IVR consultants?
   

The IVR Doctors work within your company’s technology and customer care philosophy to maximize your system investment and improve customer satisfaction. We issue are no directives or mandates; our workshops and customer testing feedback sessions are designed to engage you and your team, since the outcome is one you must live with.

The deliverables of any engagement include our menu wording and call flow recommendations, which we will support with rationale based on years of experience with systems and customers across industries and geography.

In addition, the Workshop, typically the place to start, engages your entire IVR/ASR management team and trains them with discussion and dialog in the best-in-class design principles so that future downstream work can be done in house.

And through it all, our plan is to work you and us hard, and have some fun while we do it.

In addition, see ‘Our Consulting Philosophy.”

1. •Who can we talk to who knows your work?
   

There are many who have experienced and know the value of our IVR Workshops, IVR Usability Tests, and IVR Focus Groups. We would be pleased to put in contact with those who have been in the same place with their system that you are now.

For more information, contact us:

  ivr doctors