Deploying Lousy IVRs

Here are 10 causes that contribute to the deployment of lousy IVRs.

1. Designing from the armchair, without discovery, without getting the key people involved in developing the requirements.

2. Treating the IVR deployment like an IT project and handing ownership of it to the Technology group.

3. Grossly under-financing the project (while spending an order of magnitude more on the web site).

4. Not hiring VUI experts; not hiring experienced project managers who have deployed IVR solutions. (A corollary is using internal employees to record prompts.)

5. Micromanaging the VUI designer and second-guessing them.

6. Letting legal have their way instead of battling them at every turn.

7. Not involving agents in the discovery phase, the design phase, or in the acceptance testing phase.

8. Not training agents on the IVR once deployed.

9. Altogether skipping the acceptance testing phase.

10. Not monitoring after deployment and not refining and adapting the solution to new findings.