When you ask people what they dislike about customer service, what’s one of the first things they mention?

While some customers may mention the hold time or the length of the call with the customer service agent, more often than not people complain loudly about IVRs. They are viewed as a necessary evil for many customers and companies alike. Making the IVR an easier experience for the average person is a noble goal. But unfortunately, a negative IVR experience in the past can condition customers to the unfortunate habit of zeroing out at all costs (honestly, we’ve all done it before, pressing zero repeatedly to escape the touch-tones).

We’ve all heard of sites like GetHuman that help customers bypass IVRs by showing which numbers to hit to either:

1. get to any frontline staff as soon as possible or

2.  route to the correct department

Why are sites like these so popular? The reality is that most customers don’t always realise IVRs are for routing purposes, which actually benefit them.

Companies continually reinvest in getting IVRs right but how can we help customers with shortcuts? Or put another way, what if we brought an easier IVR experience to the customer?

Well, there’s an app for that.

Lifehacker recently posted about the new Fonolo app for the iPhone, which takes IVR ease of use to the next level. This app brings Fonolo’s service to your mobile phone so that it can remember the common customer service numbers that you dial, list the most commonly called areas of an IVR phone tree and here’s the really cool part— it can automatically dial through the IVR, wait for the appropriate pauses and enter the correct menu options, and then finally ring you when it’s ready for you to talk to the customer service agent.

I realise this is a small example for a single smartphone platform (at least for now) but this is what customer service of the future will be about – delivering the customer to the experience, and leaving less to chance. Could the day be far off where companies actually reward customers for using this kind of service?

More importantly, are customer service executives thinking this way?

I’ve been thinking about this idea of delivering the customer to the experience but what other solutions or technologies are out there that deliver on this premise? Or if I am completely crazy, fire away in the comments.

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For CCC members, if you need more immediate advice, please check out the IVR Resource Centre to find:

• samples of member IVR trees
• tips on IVR design and
• resources for making informed IVR technology decisions

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