About IVR Doctors
Mr. Brandt has over 30 years experience in the telephone industry, with AT&T and regional telephone companies in large team size management and Sales and Marketing positions. For over 20 years, Mr. Brandt has conducted IVR research and consulting engagements for numerous energy utility clients. He is a frequent IVR Workshop presenter at energy industry conferences, having once represented and replaced a company for whom he had done speech-recognition research and consulting, was keynote speaker at an AESP annual conference, and has been published on IVR matters. His clients include numerous U.S. and Canadian-based utilities.
Mr. Camack spent six years in management positions in a New York Telephone call center and 18 years directing market research projects for energy utilities. His pioneering work in the IVR research evaluation field has been documented in Electric Perspectives, Quirk’s Marketing Research Review, and Ergonomics in Design. He has conducted countless IVR Workshops and IVR Usability Tests, and presented national energy industry call center conference speeches on the effective design of energy utility IVR menus. He is a recognized expert in IVR menu design, with a specialty in energy utilities and clients across the U.S. and Canada.
Joel Morgan joined IVR Doctors in 2013, although his association with our practice’s principals goes back almost 20 years. After several years in television production as a director of commercials and newscasts, he became the head of the Multimedia Production department at Market Strategies International, now Escalent. Following his 15-year career there, he started his own successful multimedia productions company, specializing in producing video, audio and graphics for the market research industry. As IVR Doctors’ Technical Director, he provides “Wizard of Oz” programming, video summaries, overall technical expertise, and IVR system voice work. Joel’s expert voice talent is available for your IVR.
Amber, a trained and experienced leader, brings her customer experience project management success at Emera Maine (now Versant Power) to IVR Doctors. She led the Emera’s IVR Improvement project team, a multi-discipline team of employees and contractors, through all the phases of project development, including decision analysis, business approvals, stakeholder engagement, budget planning, regulatory and legal compliance, procurement, and installation. The result was a high-performing new IVR that included a significantly enhanced Pay-by-Phone experience for Emera’s callers.
Nichol brings extensive success and insight in customer experience improvement at SoCalGas to IVR Doctors. There, she conducted numerous analyses, designed tracking dashboards, led multi-function assessment teams and developed continuous improvement processes, refined and improved internal and customer-facing processes, and planned 5-year channel growth strategies. Her work on the IVR not only saw it make dramatic performance improvements, it put in place templates for the continuous improvements that system has seen since she took on new responsibilities.
IVR Doctors, a leading human factors and usability-consulting firm in evaluating and improving customer experience and system performance in automated phone systems, bases its success on delivering menu-development workshops and live, real-time customer testing, which reduce telecommunications expense, drive savings to the bottom-line, and increase caller satisfaction.
Clients across the U.S. and Canada have praised IVR Doctors for being focused only a better customer experience, and not selling hardware or software which otherwise might influence their consulting objectivity. These clients recognize that a deep understanding of their user’s experience is an ongoing, essential component in evaluating how their technology works for real people in the real world.
In addition to their expertise and focus on a customer’s automated phone journey, another key deliverable is that IVR Doctors teach client teams best-in-class menu design and call flow fundamentals. Clients have described how this allows their internal phone system team to become “guardians at the gate” or “the governance committee” in fending off ad hoc recommendations from untrained ‘experts,’ such as random comments from vocal customers or even well-meaning senior management, that might disrupt the majority of callers. When thousands, even millions, of calls a month are involved, this has proven to make a big difference.
As the marketplace of technology choices expands to include speech recognition, artificial intelligence, bots, and other often flavor-of-the-month technology, testing that technology with real people finds that some of it sounds better in the conference room than works in actual practice.
Based on their experience with automated system managers and callers to their IVRs, IVR Doctors now offer online “Move to Speech” and “Emerging Technologies" Workshops, in addition to its core usability services - menu and call flow design workshops, and live, online one-on-one customer testing of automated phone systems, whether touchtone, speech, or dual-modality systems.
IVR Doctors is a (DBA) collaboration of Brandt Marketing Group, Greenville, South Carolina, and Camack Consulting, Inc., Wheeler, Oregon.