So, your company wants to “upsell” some new product or service, and your marketing department wants to add an advertisement into the system that answers your phone.
The following example demonstrates some strategies for designing a “Caller First” experience that will delight your callers, while still slipping the marketing message into the flow if it is absolutely required.
Suppose the marketing department has drafted the following advertisement to be played as the greeting to all your callers:
“Welcome to our company.
If you or someone you know is thinking about quitting drinking, you should know our office is hosting a free, hour-long workshop that can show you a fresh approach to quitting.
It’s led by a quit drinking expert.
Plus you’ll meet an ex-drinker who quit with the help of a doctor-recommended treatment option and support.
We’d love to save you a seat, so be sure to ask the receptionist, or go to www.blahblah.com.
You might be asking yourself, “What’s going to be different about quitting this time?”
Well, for starters, several things.
No finger-pointing. No scary statistics. Just honest information…and it’s free.
You’ll even get your very own take-home materials to help jump-start your quit.
Others like you have found these workshops to be useful.
All you have to do is ask our office receptionist, or go to www.blahblah.com, and you’ll be taking an important first step toward planning your quit.”
Ummmm…woof! If I’m the caller there, I’ve already hung up at “You might be asking yourself”, because “I’m asking myself” why I phoned this company that evidently doesn’t care about wasting my time. I’ll take my business elsewhere, if I can.
Reading that monologue aloud, it’s a 60-second message. It’s repetitive and patronizing. The callers are already captive on the phone for a full minute before they get to say or do anything! Do the callers really want to hear all of it? Will they be paying attention to such a thing? Do they listen to radio or TV ads, either, or just numb their minds until it’s over? Is the phone really the right place for such a 60-second advertisement?
What about your callers who don’t want to hear any of it, because they were calling about something else, not about any interest in a quit-drinking workshop? Should they have to listen to the whole thing, or any of it?
Let’s see what we can do about that. Rewrite it to be good IVR. This isn’t the radio, and we don’t have 60 seconds to burn. Make every word matter!
“If you or someone you know is thinking about quitting drinking, you should know….” First, “If you or someone you know is” sounds clunky, and some callers might think it’s grammatically incorrect. (Should it be “is” or “are”?) Why go there?
“Thinking about quitting drinking”: that’s three “-ing” words jammed together. Furthermore, the word “quit” comes up at least five or six more times in the message, and reasonably patient callers might get weary of hearing it. Maybe they’ll quit this phone call.
“You should know our office is hosting…” Is “you should know” really the right way to lead this, when the meaning is actually “we want you to know that…”? It’s generally not a good idea to tell people what they “should” know.
“It’s led by a quit drinking expert.” All decent workshops are led by experts in their topic, supposedly, so why is there any need to say this?
Step back. We’re really trying to convey the information:
- Somebody reasonably qualified
- is leading a free workshop
- that lasts for one hour, and
- the workshop is about quitting the habit of drinking.
So, let’s blow away all the other hype, and convey that information directly and respectfully. “Perhaps you know someone who would like to quit drinking. Our office is hosting a free one-hour workshop about quitting that habit.”
The next information to convey is that some successful quitter will speak about the way a prescription treatment program helped him. How about this, keeping each sentence short enough that the listener will be able to make sense of all the concepts? “Part of the presentation is by an ex-drinker who successfully quit. He had the help of a prescription treatment and its support resources.”
The workshop is supposedly worthwhile, and its next big draw is that the participants get to take home printed materials that will help them quit drinking. However, the drafted sentence sounds merely patronizing: “You’ll even get your very own take-home materials to help jump-start your quit.” My very own? So I can “jump-start” myself into quitting? Why not just tell me: “Our workshop will also have take-home materials to guide participants through the recommended process.” (That could still be improved further, perhaps, but let’s move on….)
How does the caller sign up? By asking about it, or visiting a web site. Let’s say so, directly: “To learn more about enrolling in this free workshop, ask our receptionist, or visit www.blahblah.com.”
Let’s put it all back together and time it, reading it aloud:
“Welcome to our company.
Perhaps you know someone who would like to quit drinking.
Our office is hosting a free one-hour workshop about quitting that habit.
Part of the presentation is by an ex-drinker who successfully quit.
He had the help of a prescription treatment and its support resources.
Our workshop will also have take-home materials to guide participants through the recommended process.
To learn more about enrolling in this free workshop, ask our receptionist, or visit www.blahblah.com.
(2 second pause so the caller can mentally process what was just said)
Now, I am transferring you to the receptionist.”
We are now down to 30 seconds instead of 60, and we have (hopefully!) conveyed all the important information in a well-organized manner. The first sentence tells the caller to keep paying attention if there is any interest in quitting drinking. That’s some improvement.
Still, what happens to the callers who really don’t care? Do we want to waste 30 seconds of their lives as they wait impatiently to get to the reason they called?
Let’s put in a keystroke control. Play the full advertisement to only the callers who have some interest in attending the workshop: the callers who press 1 to hear all the details after a short teaser. Nobody else needs to hear about the web site or the workshop’s syllabus, do they?
“Welcome to our company.
Perhaps you know someone who would like to quit drinking.
Our office is hosting a free one-hour workshop about quitting that habit.
If you want to hear more about that free workshop, press 1.
(pause 2 seconds: for the caller to press 1 or do nothing)
Here’s the receptionist.”
We are down to 14 seconds! For the callers who do press 1, we can make a new voice page that plays “Part of the presentation is by an ex-drinker”, etc etc through the end, and give it an option to repeat those details. That will give the callers who care about the workshop an opportunity to write down some notes about the things they are hearing.
We can still do better than that. Let’s make the assumption that we should play the advertisement only the first time someone calls; if they’re calling back a second or third time, and didn’t press 1 to hear the details that first time, don’t waste the caller’s time playing any of the advertisement again! Just go straight to the receptionist, or to a menu about other things! We can be smarter than an answering machine.
How is that programmed? Very easily! This is less than 30 minutes of work in Angel.com’s Site Builder:
- Write a row to a local data file at each call, saving the CallerID and a variable that saves a Y if 1 was pressed, or N if not (i.e. the caller wants to hear the advertisement, Y or N?).
- Set that data file to purge itself of all rows older than 1 day, purging at some low traffic time such as 4:00am. It should only have rows for people who already called today.
- On answering the call, check that data file for a match of the CallerID value and N (i.e. we already know that this particular caller doesn’t want to hear the ad).
- If such a row exists, skip the voice page that plays the ad, and go directly to whatever the caller should hear next!
So: our caller who’s back for a second or third call in the day simply hears as greeting: “Welcome to our company. Here’s the receptionist.” Delight! Bliss! No sitting through an unwanted advertisement twice! No sitting through the whole thing even once, but only the first few sentences of it!
Caller First. Do you want your callers to be a captive and squirming audience, annoyed by monologues every time they call, and already fuming before they get to talk to the receptionist? Or, do you want them to get the information they truly need to know, quickly and respectfully?
You’ve purchased an IVR system that is much more resourceful than a 1980s answering machine. Live it up! Design it well, with an emphasis always on the caller’s point of view!
Take-home materials:
- Shorter sentences rule. No sentence may have 20 words or more.
- Keep the prose simple and direct. Get rid of any grammatical constructions that a 3rd grader couldn’t write.
- This isn’t the radio. Let your callers do something interactive as early in the call as possible. No monologuing!
- Create some delight: allow callers to bypass things they don’t care about.
- Create even more delight: remember what each caller did or chose, the previous time that they called. Use that knowledge to streamline the experience to their interests.
- Someone who phones your company repeatedly doesn’t have the same needs as someone new.
- The first draft is never the best, especially when designing IVR recordings.