Your call may be recorded …

Today I spent a lot of time chatting with IVRs.  Two of those experiences stuck out because they were positive IVR experiences. Two in a row.  Somebody … no, two people,  who are in control … understand that IVRs are a real part of the customer experience and the content can be designed.

One case sticks out because the design  minimized the message length without compromising the clarity of content or what the caller should do. That goal is not surprising. It saves the organization money. Every second on the line counts. What was interesting was the way they went about minimizing the interaction duration.

The other stuck out for the opposite reason. Someone made a conscious decision to lengthen the industry standard message. The longer message was brilliantly designed to buy indulgence(s), just in case the customer service  wasn’t as stellar as promised.

In the short-as-possible message the word strings for the menu options were not repeated slavishly for each item, as often happens. Instead, some words are omitted. But the omission was  thoughtful. (If you read it out loud and you will get a better sense of the effect.)

Look again … here it is showing the deleted words.

Notice that the sequence starts complete (“For A, say A or press 1″, gets short (E, 5 …) and cycles back to the full structure. There are quite a few options. Over time people (who are not paying close attention, really) forget. But the design protects them from their dual tasking tendencies. At least it did me.  Subtle. Clear. And this design saves several seconds (or more) per call. That multiplies up quickly in IVR ROI-land.

In the the case of the longer-than-absolutely-necessary message, I needed to get to a customer service human. No way around it. But the first thing offered was not a long Pick-1-for …. menu. And it was also not the standard:

Your call may be recorded or monitored.

Instead, the intro message was:

Here at the XX Platinum Customer Care Center we are in a an ongoing effort to improve our quality customer service.  Your call may be taped or monitored  for the coaching and development of our associates….

This message is longer  than the standard message. That’s an added cost.  (Accounting, perhaps, for the speeded speech?) … But the message has an interesting sub-dialog that likely more than returns the additional cost.

I suspect that it is a bit of an inoculation effects. (Like shots … If you are exposed to something in a low, safe level, you are less likely to respond adversely when it appears at a potentially toxic level.

The message embedded in the message is a very low does of  “Sometimes we get it wrong.” Its conveyed as “We know that sometimes we get it wrong. So we are actively coaching and providing feedback to the associates. We are working on making it better.”

In the worst case, where customer service is not as customer oriented as it might be, that little bit of inoculation serves as an implicit,  proactive apology. It likely buys the customer service agent a bit of patience. And by extension, it probably minimizes escalations. Which would translate to ROI.

In the best case, where the customer service agent is polite, professional and effective (my case, btw), you are left thinking, “Hmmm. They are doing pretty well, all things considered. And they are still monitoring for improvement opportunities. This is a company that gets it.”

Its a Win-Win. For a few cents a call.

I suspect, given the quality of the strings, both companies conducted live A|B testing of variations on the messages before they went to full implementation. If not,  they have IVR designers with very good design intuition. For the rest of the organizations out there with IVRs, it is  fairly trivial to design and run limited sampling studies that demonstrate unequivocally that customers can follow the streamlined message effectively (in the first case) and that the additional message content reduces escalation incidences. And that testing woudl be the basis for a concrete ROI report.

We may never know. But in the mean time, it provides hope that other organizations will also realize that deploying evidence-driven designs in their their IVRs could save a bomb … and even (possibly) make customers more friendly.

..just because. The persuasive pull of justified requests.

	Because is an influential word. According to popular re-renderings of research, the word because can get your copies made faster, get you through airport security without waiting in line, and (sometimes) even get your children to behave. Because is persuasive (errr) because it’s a trigger. When people use the word because, it’s typically the lead-in to justify a request that they have just made. With experience, we learn that pattern. Research suggests that we may learn it so well that we accept the word “because” as the reason and may not bother to listen to what comes after it. For example, in their now classic Xerox study, Langer, Blank, and Chanowitz (1972) explored how the language of requests influences willingness to comply. To do this they observed how well different requests to cut into the line at the copier worked. They found when people ask to cut into the line to make 5 copies, they are successful about 60% of the time, no questions asked. At the baseline, people are generally polite. (For what it’s worth, the actual request was also polite: “Excuse me, I have 5 pages. May I use the Xerox machine?”) When the requestors add a reasonable justification for cutting into the line (“…because I am in a hurry”) the request becomes much more persuasive and compliance shoots up to 94%.
Because. That’s why.	The part of the study that captured people’s attention though, is what happens when you add “because….” paired with a meaningless justification: “Excuse me, I have 5 pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I need to make copies?” Um. Yeah. That would be why you would be waiting to use the Xerox machine. Despite the circular reason, the compliance rate for the “because I need to make copies” request was a somewhat stunning 93%. Giving an empty reason was just as effective as giving a good one. Based on this, Langer and colleagues suggested that in certain conditions our consideration of the actual reason for a request may be mindless. Others have extrapolated on the finding to suggest that you don’t really need to bother with the reason bit. You just need to say “because.” Compliance happens.
Read on. Because there’s more.	There are two ways to think about the mindless response that Langer and colleagues describe. First, it might be about the word “because.” Alternatively, it could be about the request. Here is the situation: You are waiting in line to make copies. Someone comes up and asks to cut in front of you and make 5 copies. Stated reason or not, asking to cut in line is fairly unusual behavior in a office. In fact, the weirdness of the unusual request makes the situation a little ambiguous. You have been socialized to be polite and (hopefully) to give others the benefit of the doubt. And, critically, the request is small. 5 copies. Will waiting for one person to make 5 more copies change the outcome of your day? Probably not. I suspect you would let them slip ahead. Now consider another scenario: You are waiting in line to make copies. Someone comes up and asks to cut in line to make 25 copies of a document “because they need to make copies.” What do you do? 25 copies isn’t a huge job. But its more substantial than 5 copies. After 25 copies you are more likely to run out of paper or jam up the machine. The risk and potential cost is just a little bit higher. High enough to be a tipping point, in fact, for most people in line. When Langer and colleagues ran that condition, the compliance went down substantially. First the good news – people still tended to be polite and helpful to a colleague in need. When the request to cut in was offered with a meaningful reason, 42% of the respondents still stepped back and let their colleague cut in – even for the larger request. However, there was no difference in compliance between just asking (“Excuse me. I have 25 copies. May I use the Xerox machine?”) and the empty reason (“…May I use the Xerox machine because I need to make copies”). In fact, replications of the Xerox study demonstrate that, compared with offering no reason, willingness to comply goes down when the justification for the request is empty (Folkes, 1985.)
Because sometimes I listen.	So what’s going on? When a request is small, the word because triggers a reflexive mental shortcut: The person said “because.” If they said “because” THEY must have some reason and if they have a reason – even if they can’t articulate it well – the cost to me is small, so OK, cut in line because whatever it is, it seems important to that person. It’s easier to say yes, than to listen carefully to the reason. Under these conditions, any reason will work as long as there is one. Which I know because you said the word because. However, if the request is large – involves potential cost – I listen to the justification you give and may actively weigh it against the possible cost of your request. If the reason isn’t good, I may comply. But if the reason doesn’t make sense, all bets are off. Applying influence strategies in the decision architecture design works the same way. If you ask me for something relatively painless – simple demographic information, perhaps – I should be more likely to cooperate if you offer me a reason for doing so. I may not even read your reason – as long as it’s there. (Do you ever click the links that say “Why we need this info”?) But if you are asking me for something real, your reason better make sense or my momentum will be gone. So it goes with persuasion tools. They tend to work more reflexively when the situation is ambiguous and cost perceived to be low. But they only work within limits. And, as the replication work shows, they can backfire if you cross the line. Be mindful chasing compliance with because. Because it has limits.
References	Langer, E., Blank, A., and Chanowitz, B. (1978). The mindlessness of ostensibly thoughtful action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36, 635-642. Folkes, V.S. (1985). Mindlessness or mindfulness: A partial replication and extension of Langer, Blank and Chanowitz. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 48(3), 600-604.