Businesses need to know which IVR investments will improve caller experiences and yield desired results.

 

So far businesses have relied on indirect metrics like containment rate to assess return on investment.  

 

Lack of information and insight has historically stood in the way of smart, bottom-line decision making by businesses. In addition, disparate recommendations in the industry have prevented the establishment of a standard metric.

 

In a white paper from Tellme, which operates the world's largest VoiceXML (News - Alert) platform to improve automation and customer service performance for businesses, Task Completion Rate promises to be the metric that will provide measurable insight into IVR performance, and ultimately ROI.

According to company officials, TCR provides a single, significant, and quantifiable metric for measuring IVR performance against business objectives, using the customer experience as a barometer. By looking beyond narrow metrics, like automation rates or call containment, businesses can focus on caller success. Every time a customer accomplishes his goal, without the assistance of a live agent, the business saves money, builds loyalty, and strengthens brand preference.

 

TCR metrics can be applied by following three steps: Understanding frequently occurring customer goals; define tasks and subtasks handled by the IVR; and consider additional sources of information. To measure TCRs, voice application developers define and tag (News - Alert) each task within the application. Businesses can assess the effectiveness of their IVR strategies and adjust them accordingly by mapping task success rates back to higher-level customer goals.

 

Click here to view the white paper, "Measuring IVR Performance." The paper provides a deeper understanding of how TCR applies to IVR systems by defining TCR and its contributions to overall customer satisfaction, identifying tasks to measure in the IVR, establishing methods to measure TCR in IVR applications, and illustrating how TCR reports answer questions that are important to business executives, analysts, managers, and developers.