Zeroing Out

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An option such as this has been the kiss of death for many an application! Why should I waste time interacting with a machine when I can just press 0 and talk to a real live human being? Pressing 0 to reach the operator rather than use the IVR application is called zeroing out (hence the title)- and it rather defeats the purpose of writing the IVR application in the first place! (Although not from the caller’s point of view...)

Fortunately there are one or two things you can do to get around this.

First off, don’t offer the option of going to an agent!

Ok, do - but hide it well. If you’re set on the caller using your application first, then don’t offer the agent option straight away. Wait until you think the caller is having difficulty with the application. So if they’ve had several noinputs or nomatches, then maybe as part of the error prompt or the main prompt, you add the information that the caller can contact an agent. They might do this by pressing zero or saying ‘operator’ or something similar. The best bit is, though, that these options only become available after the caller has difficulties. If they caller rings again and tries to get to the operator straight away, as the grammars also only become active when the prompts become active.

If you have the ability to segment your customers, then you can allow your gold customers to zero out, while your bronze customer are left to endure IVR Hell. No tot worry - having devoured this web site, you will write such wonderful IVR applications, that it won't even occur to your customers, that they want to zero out!

If you have any comments, ideas, issues, etc. about this topic why not try the voice-push forums