Bad IVR: If You Need Something From Me, How About Letting Me Know?

Once again I had a sub-optimal experience with an interactive voice response (IVR) system.

I called AT&T to check on the status of my service call – we haven’t had dial tone on our land line since mid-Saturday – and the system asked me to input “my ten digit phone number, starting with the area code.” Which I dutifully did. And you know what happened? Nothing.

And more nothing.

A whole bunch of nothing.

After a good 7-8 seconds of waiting I sighed and figured I should probably press “#” or something.

Sure enough, after pressing “#” the system cheerfully confirmed my input (“You entered yadda yadda yadda, is this correct? Press 1 if yes” etc.) and went? about its business.

This is deeply annoying and a bad user experience. From the experience perspective it’s bad because it puts a barrier in front of the caller and leaves her guessing what the system expects from her. And it’s bad from a business perspective because it increases the probability that the caller will zero out of the system and attempt to get transferred to an agent. Which costs the organization money.

So here’s a bit of advice to IVR designers…and know that even as I dispense this advice there are people out there who think about IVR’s and VUI’s 24/7, and whose advice is much more comprehensive. (I should know; I married one of these peeps.)

• For touch-tone input where you know the length of the input, don’t require me to press “#” when finished. Just take the input and move on.
• If you absolutely want (or, doubtfully, *need*) me to press “#” when I’ve finished entering information, then TELL me that you need me to press something. And tell me BEFORE you have me enter the information. Don’t just leave me hanging after I’ve fed you data. It just makes your organization look inattentive and/or stupid.
• If for some bizarre and mysterious reason you can’t see your way clear to telling me what is expected of me up-front, then tell me something like “If you’re finished entering your number, press “#” to finish” when you notice that I haven’t entered anything in a few seconds.

Tagged as: Announcements, IVR, rant, voice, Voice & Speech, VUI