About IVR Doctors
IVR Doctors is a leading human-factors and usability consulting firm in evaluating and improving customer experience and system performance in automated telephone systems. Its success reducing telecommunications expense, driving savings to the bottom line, and increasing caller satisfaction in the phone channel stems from delivering menu-development IVR Workshops and live, real-time diagnostic IVR Usability Tests.
IVR Doctors also publish a comprehensive 100-company IVR Benchmark Report for the energy utility industry.
Clients across the U.S. and Canada have praised IVR Doctors for being focused only on a better customer experience and not on selling hardware or software which might otherwise influence their consulting objectivity. These clients recognize that a deep understanding of their users’ experience is an ongoing, essential component in evaluating how their technology works for real people in the real world.
In addition to their experience and focus on a customer’s automated phone journey, another key deliverable is that IVR Doctors teach client IVR 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” to fend off ad hoc recommendations from untrained ‘experts.’ Such random suggestions from vocal customers or even well-meaning senior management, if implemented, might disrupt the vast majority of callers. When thousands, even millions, of calls a month are involved, hastily-considered changes can have a serious negative effect.
As technology offerings expand to include speech recognition, artificial intelligence, bots, and other shiny, flavor-of-the-month capabilities, testing proposed technology with callers finds that some of it sounds better in conference room demos than it works in actual practice.
Based on their experience with automated system managers and callers to IVRs, IVR Doctors now offer online “Move to Speech” and “Emerging Technologies” Workshops, in addition to its core usability services - menu and call flow designs workshops and live, online one-on-one customer testing of automated, 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.
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.
Ms. Hibbard 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.