CRM Headache? Press ‘1’ for Yes, ‘2’ for No

Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.

  CRM   Stakeholder Management  

Nothing beats an automated telephone-based service system that you have gone through repeatedly. The first time you accessed it through, it might have been a mild exercise for you to listen in the hopes that the option you wanted was readily selectable--that was, until you received information from someone telling you that hitting the zero button would bypass the system and put you in touch with a real person pretty quickly. The next few times however (and maybe you still eventually pressed zero), you could anticipate what was going to be asked, so you quickly could queue up your finger to press the right alpha-numeric code before the device on the other end went down its long-winded list of suggestions.

So what may have started as a five minute prompting system quickly became a 30 second “get you to who you need” session after a few visits. That works well for the first few times when you call a service, but just wait until they give you that old “Listen carefully as some of our menu items have changed” message and have you begin the process anew. It’s no wonder that many of us think that emails and especially online chats are more helpful than phone calls.

Ideally, a properly designed phone assistance system that provides prompts to callers has a consistency as well as a logical mapping for customer and service needs. Just as we expect…

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