Tag Archives: misnavigation

Misnavigation in your call center is a double whammy

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What is misnavigation?

Quick review: A call is considered misnavigated if a caller connects to the wrong agent to handle the request. This can be the result of the user misunderstanding the IVR or simply “zeroing-out” for some other reason. Either way, the first agent has to assess the call, inform the caller that he needs a different agent, perform the internal transfer, log the call and then rejoin the queue. These extra steps add significantly to the overall handle time.

It costs you twice

The first cost is the direct increase in agent cost. See my post “The hidden cost of…”. The second cost comes from decreased customer satisfaction. Frustrated customers have decreased loyalty and lower Net Promoter Scores.

A study conducted by Kingston Communications, shows the level of frustration with phone menu navigation. Respondents were asked what annoyed them most when calling customer service lines: First place (54%), was “overseas staff”. Second place (22%) was “the need to navigate automated responses”.

Great customer service leads to customer satisfaction

Here’s a quote worth remembering:

Great customer service leads to customer satisfaction, which leads to customer loyalty, which leads to company profitability.

– Stephen Brown, Professor, Center for Services Leadership at
Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business.

 Can you afford not to give your callers a better alternative?

Misnavigation not solved by speech-driven menus

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Speech recognition can be awesome

Speech recognition is a technology that can do amazing things. For example, you can watch an Android app translate from one language to another in real time here.

… or silly

Unfortunately, its use in phone menus is not quite as stellar. In fact, it some cases it seems counter-productive.  For example, when you replace “press 1 for billing” with “for billing say ‘billing’.” It’s almost comical.

Give us some credit, please

Another example: The system that tries to seem advanced by claiming it can digest regular English: “Tell me what you want to do.” This is usually followed by “you can say ‘billing’ or ‘technical support’”. Let’s give callers some credit: they know that there are only a few different types of agents at the call center, so there are really only a few choices to make. There is no point in getting chatty with the auto-attendant.

Are you really decreasing the burden on the caller by replacing “press 1 for billing” with “tell me what you want to do?”. In the latter case, the caller now has to think about what kind of phrase the system might be expecting.

Misnavigation pains continue

For these reasons, we have found – anecdotally, at least – that speech-driven menus fare no better at reducing misnavigation compared to tone-based menus. Although there are cases where speech recognition really shines (directory assistance is a great example), the basic call-routing role is not one of them.

It’s not a rare day that I hear someone walking in the street on the phone with customer service … screaming into their phone: ‘AGENT, AGENT, AGENT!’ … it’s an automated attendant at the other end of the line … [which] we have come to begrudgingly accept as a fact of life.

– Blake Landau, editor of CustomerManagementIQ

The hidden cost of misnavigation in your call center

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What is misnavigation?

A call is considered misnavigated if a caller connects to the wrong agent to handle the request. This can be the result of the user misunderstanding the IVR or simply “zeroing-out” for some other reason. In any case, the first agent has to assess the call, inform the caller that he needs a different agent, perform the internal transfer, log the call and then rejoin the queue. These extra steps add significantly to the overall handle time.

The cost

To calculate how much misnavigation is adding to the cost of your call center, you need to get: 1) Your misnavigation rate, 2) Average time it takes for an agent to handle an internal transfer 3) Average cost of agent time. This figure will then help you put it all together:

The impact of misnavigation

I go through this calculation with companies all the time and it is part of the Fonolo ROI calculator. If you would like to know more, feel free to contact me

But that’s only half the story

There is another cost to misnavigation: frustrated customers, decreased loyalty and lower Net Promoter Scores.  A study conducted by Kingston Communications, shows the level of frustration with phone menu navigation. Respondents were asked what annoyed them most when calling customer service lines: First place (54%), was “overseas staff”. Second place (22%) was “the need to navigate automated responses”.

Can you afford not to give your callers a better alternative?

Case study shows the difficulty of defeating misnavigation

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One of the negative outcomes of phone menus (or IVR systems) is frequent misnavigation, which is the industry term for a caller getting connected to the wrong agent.

Phone menus cause “entrapping”

On the CustomerManagementIQ blog, call center consultant Tripp Babbit recently posted “Hate the Game, Not the Player: IVR vs. the Customer” where he recounted an IVR project he was involved in.

The IVR company had a simple solution, “let’s route problem calls to the right person,” and off they went… Funny thing … 41% of the [calls] got misrouted or had to get transferred… The problem here is that contact centers typically have a variety of demands, and IVR’s become entrapping technology that can’t absorb the variety customers bring.

As we’ve been talking to companies, we’ve heard variations on this story many times. The misnavigation rate Babbit mentions (41%) is right in line with what we hear. In fact, we’ve heard of rates as high as 50%.

Callers hate phone menus

Misnavigation costs money by wasting agent time. But it also increases caller frustration —  the general dislike for phone menus is well documented. Babbit phrases it bluntly:

…call me indifferent with regards to the IVR. Customers, on the other hand, ‘hate’ them.

Narcissistic companies believe they are saving money when they deploy these modern marvels.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Anything that separates a customer from getting an answer quickly and accurately is an annoyance.  Furthermore, it adds to costs and loses customers.”

Hiding your agents to save money is a dead-end

As more and more such case studies and surveys come to light, it is becoming clear that the IVR as a “call-avoidance” tactic is not a smart in the long-term. Yes, it is expensive to have agents on the phone. But it is also expensive to lose customers. The better way to reduce cost is to make agents as efficient as possible. We think Fonolo’s set of features is a great way to do this.

Misnavigation is a hidden cost in nearly every call center

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What is misnavigation?

The central function of an IVR system is to connect the caller to the right agent type (e.g. billing vs. sales) or to divert the caller to a self-serve system.  The navigation stage of the call succeeds if the caller connects to the right agent for his issue. It fails if the caller misunderstands the instructions, or loses patience and “zeros out”. This “misnavigation rate” is a metric closely watched by managers of call centers and can be surprisingly high. Based on conversations with various companies, rates are typically around 30% and can go as high as 50%.

The cost

You can calculate how much misnavigation is adding to the cost of your call center. You need to get: 1) Your misnavigation rate, 2) Average time it takes for an agent to handle an internal transfer 3) Average cost of agent time. This figure will then help you put it all together:

The impact of misnavigation

CMIQ calls Fonolo’s approach “Nirvana”

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Customer Management IQ, one of the leading publications covering the call center and customer service space covered Fonolo in a recent article.

Senior editor Blake Landau wrote:

The paradigm here is that callers, like visitors to a standard or mobile web page, get to click or tap on the box that best represents what they need. From there, the Fonolo application connects them directly to the agent that can best serve them. Callers get directed to the right agent on a first try, instead of ‘mis-directing’—but no longer interface with the plague of DTMF or speech driven menus. Nirvana!

The problem of “mis-directing” or, as we call it, “misnavigating”, is more than just an annoyance to callers, it can also add considerable cost to the call center operation. When a call is connected to the wrong agent, time is wasted while the agent: assesses the caller’s needs, concludes that an internal transfer is needed, explains that to the caller, makes the transfer, then logs the call or does other wrap-up work before rejoining the queue.

Landau discussed Fonolo’s approach to turning the phone menu into a visual interface and described it as a “more natural way” to navigate.  We certainly agree. It is hard to overstate just how much people dislike traditional phone menus. Whether they are speech-driven or tone-driven, they do a poor job of getting callers to the right agent while usually increasing the caller frustration.

Landau concludes:

[Fonolo’s] mission is not to dismiss or replace the IVR, but rather to make it work better by inserting more intuitive interfaces between the call center and the customer to better both sides of every manager’s equation—customer experience and cost control.