Spoken Communications

How one bank rethought automated customer service

There is nothing new that can be done to differentiate brands via IVRs.

Unless, of course, you're a Norwegian bank sponsoring a boys' choir. In that case, you can totally rock the IVR by having the boys' choir sing every prompt.

Really. Must be seen to be believed! Automation does not have to be boring. It can be downright moving.

And note this stunning statistic: in December, the telebank was called more than two million times. The population of Norway is 4.9 million. Think you can't distinguish your brand through your IVR? Think again.

 

The worst customer service fail of 2011

If you've ever feared a bad customer service incident going viral, don't read this; you'll have nightmares for weeks.

The blogosphere has been abuzz with the stunningly bad customer service one gamer received from a third-party marketing company charged with PS3 controller overlays. I wrote an overview of the kerfuffle from the PR point of view here and continue to add updates.

The quick summary: Dave (the customer) pre-orders a PS3 controller overlay, paying in advance in full with the promise of early December delivery. Early December comes and goes; no word. Dave emails Ocean Marketing to inquire about the delivery date (remember, he's already paid in full) and receives short email from Paul Christoforo saying only "december 17" without so much as a capital letter or period. Dave asks for more details. An increasingly condescending, bullying and punctuation-free series of emails ensues, with Chrisotoforo ranting at Dave, telling Dave to "put on your big boy hat and wait like everyone else" and "you think you speak for billions son your just a kid you speak for yourself no one cares what you think that’s why were growing and moving 20-50 thousand controllers a month."

Dave brings the email exchange to Mike Krahulik of Penny Arcade and founder of PAX, who posts the content online and contacts Christoforo to cancel his booth at PAX. The internet explodes with critiques of Christoforo's unbelievably bad customer service.

What has made the debacle interesting to follow is the pure schadenfreude of it all--Christoforo, the most clueless of the clueless, had no idea that his simple customer service email exchange would become public. With every blustering defense he tried to make, he only made things worse. When his gaming contacts disavowed him, he called them names publicly via Twitter. When he got flamed, he changed his Twitter account, but internet gamers quickly discovered the ploy and posted his new account name.

When he half-heartedly apologized, it was only for underestimating Dave's and Krahulik's level of influence, saying "I underestimated you and its cost me a lot of trouble thousands of spam emails , a lot of personal bashing , and internet spam and trouble and just overall stress with my wife and newborn." Notice that he never actually apologizes for being rude or for the product delay, just for doing so to someone with influence. Even Geico jumped in on the fun, lightheartedly mocking the poor customer service with a hilarious Tweet.

Now, Christoforo and Ocean Marketing have become synonymous with ultimately bad, disrespectful and supremely ineffective customer service. There is a meme to this effect, and a Cheezburger page set up just to mock the hapless marketer.

There are quite a few lessons to be learned from the Ocean Marketing debacle:

1. Don't use third-party marketers with plagiarized sites. The Examiner ascertained that most of Ocean Marketing's site was plagiarized without credit from other sites. When you hire a third-party company, do your homework. Check references. This person is representing your company both to channel sales and to the public. Do your homework before farming out the face of your company.
2. Hire for the right experise. Christoforo was ostensibly a marketer and SEO specialist--why was he communicating directly with customers for customer service? While I agree that everyone in the company is in customer service, this guy clearly has zero skills and training in talking to customers. He may have been fine at sending out free units for review, but he should never have been allowed to interact with customers.
3. Don't hire anyone who can't communicate clearly. The fact alone that Christoforo has never sent an email that didn't contain prolific misspellings, missed punctuation and lack of coherent thought should have disqualified him from any communication position from the start. Claiming to have connections in the industry is one thing, but even if that were true (which, it turns out, it isn't), the lack of ability to communicate absolutely anything clearly should have disqualified him from both marketing and customer service positions.
4. Ethics matter. PR issues aside, it takes ethical integrity to build good customer relationships. Lying about one's qualifications would indicate that the person isn't qualified to handle either marketing or customer service.

While not everyone has the luxury of the candidate pool that Google has, it might be worth it to consider asking interview questions such as, "You receive this email from a customer who has paid up front for a controller overlay, but we just discovered the controllers are held up in China and won't be delivered before Christimas as promised. What do you do?"

 Hint: If the candidate replies with, "I'd go into a rant and blame him for being an idiot because I don't think he's influential and it's not my job to make nice with customers, anyway," don't hire him.

Good robots vs bad robots: two cases of customer service automation

Good robots versus bad robots: in customer service automation, there are winners and losers. There is good customer service, and there is bad customer service. What makes for a good automated experience versus an evil one?

Cross-posted to Talk It Up

I write a lot about customer service here, especially as it relates to the call center. And I get a little tired of the all-too-fluffy blog posts on customer service that give vapid advice (Smile when you talk!) or simply recount a bad experience to illustrate the fact that, in fact, bad customer service exists.

We're aware that bad customer service exists and that good customer service isn't as easy as it looks. And one of the controversial aspects of customer service is the trend toward automation. Some users proclaim their hatred loudly and flock to sites such as GetHuman. Others... well, no one really sings the praises of a well-designed IVR or email 'bot, because when they are beautifully designed, they simply work as promised and let the user move on to focusing on more important tasks.

Over the last week, I had two experiences with automation in customer service. With one, the automation was evil: involuntary to begin with, and the organization prevaricated, blamed the user and required several inquiries and escalations to complete a basic process. With the other, the automation was so simple as to be practically invisible, anticipating the user's every need. What can we learn from each one?

Automation #1: Email list auto-add (Evil)

With the first experience, I was added to an email list for night club events taking place in the D.C. area. I'm unsure as to how I got on the list, since I didn't subscribe and the email in question is used almost exclusively for listener feedback from a podcast I produce. It's not even really my email; it's the show's email address. At any rate, I sought an unsubscribe button, since (a) I live 3,000 miles from D.C. (b) I don't frequent nightclubs and (c) I generally don't drink cocktails or spirits.

The first thing I did was seek an unsubscribe option on the offending emails. No such luck. But I was given the prominent option to forward to a friend.

So, grumpy at the extra effort, I was forced to email the organization to report the spam and to ask to be taken off the organization's list. What followed was a series of ill-mannered prevarications designed to make it extremely difficult for the user to be removed from the list. The organization responded, insisting that I use a nonexistant unsubscribe button. When I pointed out their newsletters not only do not have an unsubscribe button but that I'd never signed up in the first place, they insisted I had signed up for the list (!!)  and that they were unable to remove me. Only robots can add and remove customers? Evil!

My response pointing out the lack of an Unsubscribe option:

Their response - blame the customer for the automation mistake:

I reported the behavior to the organization's email service, as most services have regulations regarding spam and automated subscriptions. Also, it's unlikely that the organization was unable to manage its user list and delete users on request, and it did turn out to be untrue, as the representative at iContact was kind enough to point out: "As for adding and removing contacts, the sender does have those capabilities. If an iContact customer is claiming they are unable to perform this task please let us know so we can look into the situation."

After some discussion about the lack of an Unsubscribe button, the issue was resolved by the email service provider--but never by the organization itself.

What went wrong:

• Automating without consent. It is absolutely best practices not to subscribe a user to a list without explicit consent. Even if I had attended an event once, that does not equate to consenting to being added to an email list. Likewise, every email list message must provide a clear unsubscribe option; hiding behind "Update Email Address" is no excuse or substitute. And let's face it; it's a little sleazy.
• Arguing with the customer. I'm not a believer that the customer is always right; we're wrong all the time. But arguing is fruitless, especially with regards to simple transactions that occur every day. Best to make a polite apology and remedy the situation.
• Blaming the customer. Claiming that the customer's situation is her own fault is rarely helpful, even on the occasions when it is true. (Although in this case, it wasn't.) The best customer service agents err on the side of compassion in instances in which automation has failed. What most likely happened in this case is the organization either purchased or "borrowed" a list from some event organizer I had attended during my lst trip to D.C. and automatically added all the emails from it. In any case, moving toward a solution is better than placing blame on either side.
• Not solving the issue. I'm unsure why the organization insisted it was unable to resolve the issue even after its provider confirmed that it could, but I'm reminded that in the world of automated emails, one human being taking just a few minutes to provide service is all it really takes for a user to have a good customer experience.

Automation #2: Ordering delivery (Good)

In sharp contrast to the above experience, last weekend I had a seamless experience ordering a delivery dinner via the internet.

When I found myself too exhausted after a full day at TEDx Rainier '11 to make or seek food, a friend suggested 24hour delivery. I'm sure others use this site daily, but I almost never order food to be delivered, so I wasn't sure where to start! But the site made it effortless, seamless and simple, just as every customer experience should be.

First, I did a search for restaurants that delivered at that time of night near my location. Then, I checked the ratings and selected an Indian restaurant that had good vegetarian reviews. As it turned out, clicking on the restaurant name brought up an interactive menu, on which the user can click on items to instantly add them to an immediate order. Likewise, each item has the option to include special instructions, such as "extra ketchup" or "medium spicy."

Even better, after the order is complete, there is the option to review, opt to pay in cash in person or via credit card; there is even a spot for a credit card or cash tip and for instructions on getting in to the user's residence. In short, the automation on the site considered all possibilities, absolutely everything the user might want and the driver might need to ensure a smooth transaction.

And smooth it was! A receipt was delivered via email for recordkeeping, and the site has a humor-filled page of FAQs should something go amiss. In short, every need the customer might have was already addressed, so only the most bizarre of situations would merit contacting the company.

What went right:

• Anticipated customer needs. The automation worked because every aspect of the search, order and delivery process had been designed as if it were a science.
• Gave more information, not less. Instead of making it difficult to report issues or assuming the customers would call if they were upset, the site proactively listed the most common questions in a friendly, laid-back manner, undoubtedly reducing the number of complaints both to the retaurants and to the site.
• Provided the opportunity to give positive feedback. The site allows users to rate the restaurants and create a community feel rather than a top-down situation.

Two examples of automation: one email automation that banks on users being too lazy to notice the involuntary robotic subscription to complain and one e-commerce automation that anticipates and delivers users' needs to complete a transaction.

Customer service automation isn't evil; well-designed self-service experiences can be incredibly easy, stress-free and provide a better customer experience than even an interaction with a live agent. It's in the way the organization chooses to address customer needs that makes the difference.

What does your customer actually want?

What do your customers actually want, and what are you delivering?

Thanks to Marsha Collier for passing on this afternoon funny:

And the comic gets a chuckle because we've all been there. We have been the project manager or marketer for such a product, and it's likely we have been the customer at some point as well. In the absence of a genius such as Steve Jobs, who had an uncanny ability to design products that consumers wanted and needed without their saying a word, how can we deliver what the customer actually wants?

• Ask about functionality, not features. Better than, "How much do you want to spend?" is "In the best of all possible worlds, what would you like to be able to do?" The answer could be as simple as "map out my destination while on a phone call" or "properly identify and transfer 80% of callers to the right department with a wait time of under five minutes and a satisfaction score of at leave 90%." Then drill down deeper with the secret unicorn question: "If this were magic, what would you like to be able to do?" Never forget that some science-fiction didn't take too long to become science fact. More importantly, these questions give insights into the customer's pain points that might not previously have been voiced.
• Document the process. If certain features are impossible or too costly with current technology, document it. If features are available and simple to install but not popular or requested, document it. If the customer suggests additional features or benefits, document it.
• Make marketing a process. Market benefits, not features. Features change over time, but the benefit to the customer doesn't. Be willing to accept customer feedback as part of the development process and engage in a dialogue with customers about what they really need and want from your products.

What about you? How does your organization prevent delivery of a lackluster product when the customer only wanted a tire swing?

Links of the week: at-home agents, supermarket self-service and mobile customer service

This week's news in the world of call centers, customer service and technological innovation. Miss something? No sweat. We monitored the top stories and bring you the top news for call center managers:

• Getting more bang for your at-home buck. The debate about remote agents rages on, really, with very little argument on the con side. McDonagh points out that working from home can be a reward for top-performing agents, a failsafe for bad weather, a bonus for agent retention (especially when an agent's spouse must move the family out of town) and an easy way to enable weekend and after-hours bonus shifts.
• Workforce management in the multichannel call center. How to get one's ducks in a row when the ducks entail phone calls, web chat and web callbacks? ICMI's latest report shows that workforce management for channels other than phone are lacking: "Of those centers that do report having a WFM system, however, many of them do not have accounting in their system for channels other than telephone. Only 38.5% said their WFM system accounts for email; the number’s even lower for chat (18.5%) and lower yet for fax and video chat."
• Customers don't want to talk to you, either. Forbes reports that customers want their questions resolved immediately, with no waiting. So what else is new?
• In the realm of grocery shopping, at least, live agents are winning against self-service. USA Today reports that supermarket shoppers are avoiding self-service in favor of live checkout help. However, I take exception to the article's original title,Shoppers prefer customer service to self-checkout. What the study determined was that shoppers preferred live agents to self-checkout. Self-checkout doesn't immediately correlate to a 100% lack of customer service.
  Some of us like the ability to check out our five items ourselves and get on our way without inane chatter at the checkout line!
• Is mobile the next frontier for customer service? This article reports on the popularity of smartphones and asks the obvious question: why aren't more companies harnessing mobile for customer service and engagement? A keen insight: "When businesses approach customer service from a mobility perspective, they need to consider their existing customer service strategy and how they can enhance basic customer engagement with proactive contact, personalized applications and location-based services." Move it to the phone and make it two-way communication, folks!

Teaching customer service to kids: Sitel's new book, Agent D, Can You Help Me?

It's never too early to teach kids to be polite, and it's never too early to show kids the hard and sometime creative work that call center agents do.

That was the premise of Sitel's new children's book, Agent D, Can You Help Me? It's designed to show kids that call center agents can be heroes to the customers who really need their assistance. If you've ever made a call center call in which the agent stayed calm and cheerful and maybe even changed your mood a bit, you might agree that hardworking agents can be a bit heroic.

Sitel called upon some of its agents in its Asheville, North Carolina location to "creatively illustrate life in a Sitel customer contact center in a way that a child could enjoy and understand." The book is geared toward readers ages 2-8 and focuses on how agents help others in their work.

The book was officially unveiled on August 17th at Sitel's employee appreciation award luncheon. Employees leafed through the book and read along with the adventures of Agent D as he tried to help customer Jean discover why her internet was down.

The book has a foreword by Tennessee Governer Bill Haslam, who added “‘Agent D, Can You Help Me?’ is not only a well-written and colorfully illustrated children’s book that parents and children will enjoy reading together, but also a user-friendly resource that will help parents who work in Sitel’s global call centers teach their children about the far reaching merits of their work as customer service agents.”
 
I'll admit that my first reaction to a children's book on call center agents wasn't entirely positive. Would it glamorize a world that is governed by metrics, high turnover and tiny cubicles? Can't we hope for our children to strive for more? But Agent D does bring an age-appropriate view of the heart of the call center to kids: it's an industry devoted to helping people. The successful call center agents are the ones that have that drive at their core, and the successful companies are the ones that richly reward devotion to customer service.

President and COO of Sitel, Bert Quintana, says, “I’m personally so proud of our talented Asheville team who developed a unique way for our employees across the globe to share with their children the great work they do on a daily basis.”

And well Quintana should be. Call center agents are the front line for customer loyalty, and their work often goes unappreciated. Giving kids a lesson in the power and value of customer service early on is a laudable accomplishment.

Customer Service roundup: will your customers or employees take a bullet for you?

What you missed in Customer Service thought leadership this week

You've got a lot on your plate, and that one client kept you up troubleshooting until 3:00 AM (turned out they unplugged a cable). So maybe you didn't catch all the customer service news and thought-provoking insights this week. No worries; we did. Here's what you missed:

• Thoughts on customer loyalty and how much of it a rewards program really returns. Our favorite former blogger Kathy Sierra gives a nice rant on Hugh MacLeod's Gaping Void blog, arguing that Your Customer Won't Take a Bullet for You and bluntly states, "If we have to pay to get it, it's not loyalty."
• Following our own post that employee satisfaction comes before customer satisfaction, funny man Greg Levin spews hilarious yet useful advice on Seven Ways to Elevate Agent Engagement and Retention in the call center. My favorite tidbit? "Covet community service as much as customer service. People are inspired by and want to work for companies that care about all human beings – not just customers and employees." Amen to that. Creating a company mission to give back to the community creates a sense of involvement and well-being that can't be duplicated.
• John Jantsch over at Duct Tape Marketing is always brilliant. Lately, he's been writing about the customer experience, something near and dear to my own heart. In this post, he advocates beginning product development with the customer experience in mind: ask what action you want your customers to take 30, 60 and 180 days after purchase and build the product offering based on those desired experiences.
• Forbes shares a way to put it customer service in perspective: what's a lifetime customer worth? Have you calculated the value of a lifetime customer? Knowing that figure will help you and your employees make decisions today, even when the customer is dead wrong.

The first step to employee engagement: employee satisfaction

by Heidi Miller, Chief Conversation Officer

As a follow up to our earlier post on employee satisfaction winning over customer satisfaction, a relevant video on creating employee engagement.

The video begins by covering the most salient point of employee engagement: that the building block to engagement is employee satisfaction. Before worrying about engagement, does your company provide the basics so that employees will be satsified with their work? The givens for employee satisfaction: suitable salaries, job security and good working conditions. Without those, implementing all the engagement in the world will be far less effective.

How to use Employee Engagement to boost your business - Explania

Which comes first: employee satisfaction or customer satisfaction?

Which comes first, employee satisfaction or customer satisfaction?

A fascinating question. As Chief Conversation Officer at Spoken, I have Google Alerts set up for "customer service," "customer experience" and several variations thereof. I spend a lot of my mornings skimming over inane articles and posts in which the writer claims that teaching agents to smile or a bit of extra training will make a substantial difference in the customer experience.

There is a strong correlation between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. It's a symbiotic relationship; one can't exist without the other. Above-average and excellent customer service levels can't be achieved without engaged, empowered employees. A few training sessions, a feeble motivational contest with free pizza or a cube-decorating contest do not bespeak a pervasive corporate culture that values the experience and knowledge of its frontline agents. In the absence of a corporate culture that promotes frontline employees as empowered and valued team members, customer service will suffer.

Consider this: 40-80% of customer satisfaction and loyalty is determined by the customer-employee relationship and a one-point increase in annual ACSI score for a company is equal to an increase of 11.4% of ROI and a $654 million increase in market value of equity. Researchers have shown that the drivers of of employee engagement are satisfaction with job security, satisfaction with benefits and opportunities for promotion.

Case #1: Zappos

I apologize for trotting out the supremely obvious example, but Zappos is an excellent example with ood reason. Zappos requires that every employee, from the C-suite on down, spend a month on the phones with customers. They offer to pay their agents over $2,000 to quit training to make sure that everyone is dedicated to customer service and in it for the long haul, not just a paycheck. They empower their agents to change their workspace, their processes and even the overall culture. Maura Sullivan, the senior manager of Zappos' customer loyalty team, said in an interview with Greg Levin:

"More than anything I think the key to retaining team members is the environment you create for them to work in day in and day out. Answering phones eight hours a day is a tough job, and we want our employees to feel engaged and empowered – and to have fun!'

Too often executives pay lip service to the idea of customer service standards without providing a pervasive corporate culture to support it. If an employee does not get the message every day that good service, initiative and creativity will be rewarded, then the company will be left with unmotivated employees who show up for a paycheck.

At Call Center Week, Jane Judd, a Senior Manager of the Customer Loyalty team at Zappos, spoke on customer loyalty. She told an anecdote of an agent who had the longest call on record: over eight hours. The staff came by to bring the agent food and drink and spell her for bathroom breaks, but she refused and stayed on the call until the customer was happy and the call ended, eight hours later. Now tell me, are your agents that dedicated?

Case #2 HCL Technologies

HCL Technologies is a global IT services company with $2 billion in yearly revenues. In 2005, the CEO, Vineet Nayar, adopted a new philosophy and even wrote a book about it: Employees First, Customer Second. A great slide deck detailing the pervasive changes to the corporate culture is posted; I encourage you to look at it in more detail. Some of the changes that HCL instituted?

• A smart service desk for employees that raises 31,000 employee concerns each month
• The CEO reverse blogged--posted questions to employees
• An annual event takes strategic discussions out from behind closed doors
• Councils to promote common interests and unleash creativity
• Recognition for "extra mile" employees

The key to the transition was an insistence on radical transparency from the top down. A summary of the internal logic in five basic tenets, excerpted from the book (emphasis mine):

1. Transparency ensures that every stakeholder knows the company's vision and understands exactly how his or her contribution assists the organization in achieving its goals.
2. Transparency helps to ensure that every stakeholder has a deep, personal commitment to the aims of the organization.
3. For the Gen Y members of our workforce transparency is a given. They post their life stories in public domains; they expect nothing less in their workplaces.
4. In a knowledge economy, we want customers to be transparent with us, to share their ideas, their visions for the future, and their strategies for solving core problems. Without such transparency, how can we create the technology solutions that will accelerate their growth and strengthen their businesses?
5. The only way these outsiders [lateral hires brought on for specific projects] can get up to speed quickly and be as effective as possible is through sharing of information and complete transparency about the strengths and weaknesses of the assignment.

The results? Attrition dropped, and now the CEO spends seven hours a week answering questions posed by employees. That is the difference between paying lip service to customer satisfaction and instituting a culture of empowerment and employee engagement: the CEO himself takes a substantial amount of time every day to engage with employees.

Companies must engage their employees if they have any hope of being competitive in the area of customer satisfaction. To differentiate the organizational brand in both market performance and financial returns, companies should take a long, hard look at their corporate culture and question their own transparency and engagement.

Top Three Customer Service Complaints and How to Address Them

Customer service doesn't have to be complicated or annoying

In this recent video from Consumer Reports, the top three customer complaints relating to customer service are profiled:

1. Waiting too long on hold
2. Can't reach a human
3. Navigating convoluted menus

Interestingly, most of these complaints are unique to IVRs. When describing human interactions at a brick and mortar store, for example, there may be complaints about wait times, but no one ever complains that he can't reach a human in a store or that the menus are too difficult to navigate. Humans are all around in real life--but can they solve your customer service problem?

The truth is that a well-designed IVR solution can actually address all three of these common customer service complaints and provide an extremely effective customer service experience. Let's address each issue individually:

Waiting too long on hold. Hold time is the bane of call centers and contact centers everywhere, and the balance of qualified staff to quantity of callers can be a difficult one to maintain. And yet, there are easy alternatives to forcing your callers to suffer through endless hold music.

• First, consider offering self-service options, either in the IVR or online. For any industry call center, there is a list of the most commonly asked agent questions along with a procedural list highlighting how to correct them. If the issue has a common, standard solution with a proven success rate, there is no need to make callers wait on hold. Offer them the chance to self-serve, either in the IVR or online. Like the self-serve checkout lane at the grocery store, sometimes it's just faster and less frustrating if the customer does it herself.
• Second, offer a callback. Within a well-designed IVR, when wait times pass a certain threshhold, the option to receive a callback is available. The process is simple: callers select the option for a callback and enter their phone number through DTMF or speech recognition while retaining their priority in the queue. The caller hangs up, goes about his life, and receives a call back from an agent when the queue clears.
• Third, offer chat support. Chat support offers the immediacy of phone interaction with a built-in lag time that allows agents to multitask. Currently, chat queues tend to be shorter than phone queues, and customers can get near-immediate answers. While some still may prefer the IVR channel, deflecting those comfortable with chat support to that channel will ease the burden on the call center queue and reduce hold times for everyone.

Can't reach a human. We've written about this issue before. The issue isn't that the caller can't reach a human; the issue is that the robots aren't well-designed. A well-designed IVR will quickly collect enough information to identify the caller and promptly route the caller to a human agent. What is frustrating for callers is an IVR designed by engineers rather than customer service experts; what is logical to a technician may not be a logical call flow to a real human caller. Tip: if you want to know where your IVR isn't working, ask your front line agents. They will tell you exactly where the IVR is failing callers.

Navigating convoluted menus. There is no excuse for this one; IVR menus should be simple, direct and reflect the most common customer needs. A few basic rules:

• No more than five choices. Humans can remember three or four choices easily, five with some difficulty. Giving more than that will frustrate callers.
• No more than two choices on a submenu. If your submenu has more than two choices, you need to redesign your IVR.
• More than one submenu. Having to navigate past even one submenu creates a barrier between the caller and the agent. Throwing two or three submenus in the call flow makes the experience more mazelike and less customer-friendly.
• Use speech recognition. Pushing 1, 2 or 3 is fine for simple tasks, but it makes for a much better and more personal caller experience when the caller can simply say "I need help with billing" or "I'm having a problem with my printer."

When designing a customer response system, designers should keep in mind the most basic of human needs: callers simply want to be understood, helped and sent on their way. In many cases, this can be achieved with well-designed automation. In fact, studies have shown that for many routine tasks, customers prefer self-service to engaging in small talk with a live agent. Activating an effective speech recognition solution, designing and IVR with intuitive menu choices and offering callers callback and chat options address these common customer service issues as well as the human needs behind them.