As I run the company Twitter, browse LinkedIn, and check news feeds for the keywords IVR, Call Centers, and CRM every day, I don’t hear much negative news about our sector of the telecommunications industry. This isn’t surprising, because who wants to dwell on negative perceptions of the space they work in? Well, we do – because at Interactions, we view our product as a solution to the negative aspects of the unpopular IVR industry. And that’s why we wanted to get involved in this independent study from a NYU professor about IVR industry perceptions. We could tell you over and over again that consumers hate IVRs, but now we have the numbers to back it up.

For me, the most compelling statistic in this study pertained to consumers’ beliefs about who reaps the most benefit from IVR. Only 15% thought that IVR systems benefit the customer, while 34% thought they benefit the company. Yet, an overriding 49% believed that IVR systems benefit neither the company nor the customer. So, almost half of the surveyed consumers think that IVR systems have no use, yet the overwhelming majority of companies use them. IVR system expenditures are expected to total $1.9 billion in the next five years. Only 1% of consumers believed that IVR systems benefit both the company and the consumer. I can tell you that this is a little different than Nuance’s findings last year indicating that consumers desire more automation in the call center. Interesting.

Another finding that intrigued me shows that only 13% of respondents believed that IVR systems were easy to use. A supporter of IVR will be quick to claim that if an IVR system is well designed, it will be easy to use, which is unfortunately not the case for many consumer-facing brands. While this has some truth to it, there is much more to the story. Consumers find IVRs troubling by their very nature. You’re asked to code in menu commands that try to fit your issue into a category. If there isn’t an applicable category, you wind up getting transferred multiple times, rendering the IVR useless. Some systems are designed with speech recognition that prompts you to repeat yourself or simply can’t understand what your saying. If you are like me, you try to zero-out using services like Gethuman.com. Or you just yell at the system and repeatedly ask for an agent until you reach a live representative. I imagine if you found yourself to this blog, you already knew all the above. To sum it up, the majority of users seem to agree that IVR systems are difficult to use, and no matter how you set it up, the traditional technological restrictions prevent companies from curing the difficulty.

I also found it interesting that consumers don’t trust IVR systems to fulfill their requests with accuracy and security. As one of the interviewees said, “If I’m not next to a computer and I need to check my [bank account] balance, I’ll call the automated system. Also, to check my remaining minutes on my cell, my cell bill, things like that…. I’ll buy movie tickets, maybe theater tickets on the phone, but not a plane ticket. If it costs more than $50, I’m either buying it from a man or from a website.” The majority of respondents, around 36%, agreed that they trust automated systems with simple things but won’t make any decisions without live representative interactions. The conclusion I draw from this is that even if an IVR system is well designed, the caller won’t trust the system with any major decisions – leading the call to a live representative, which defeats the main purpose of the IVR.

There was one statistic that I found particularly hopeful for automated systems. The true-false statement went as follows: “In general, I prefer using an automated self-service system as opposed to having a customer service representative help me.” 66% responded false. Yet 34% responded positively. This is an encouraging statistic because it shows that a good amount of people actually do use, and even prefer, self-service, whether its via the web or IVR, over using a customer service representative. Therefore, as technology improves and self-service options become more viable, people will be willing to adopt these methods.

In conclusion, I’d say that our initial feeling was echoed by the study, people really don’t like IVR. Which I’m fine with because it makes describing our company a little easier: “You know those annoying call center lines that make you press 1 for sales, 2 for technical support, etc.? Well, we have a solution.”