The best call to an IVR is a short one. Before you record your IVR prompts, go through every sentence with an editing knife. Every word needs to justify its existence, and every sentence should use the shortest possible phrasing without loss of meaning. However, there is such a thing as "too succinct"- some prompts are not readily understandable unless you add a brief description or mention of the items inside the menu they are referring to. There is no hard-and-fast rule and the best way of ascertaining effectiveness is through user testing.

Because an IVR system is delivered via audio, it involves serial presentation - one thing gets presented after another. Items at the top of the list are very prominent, and items are progressively less prominent as you go down the list. This contrasts with web design where you can use visual techniques like bold text to make items jump out of the page irrespective of their order. The implication here is that you need to find out which paths through the system are going to be the "journeys" most travelled by your users, and you need to put these at the top of the menus, to make sure the experience is short, direct and hassle-free.

IVRs are best for small, specific domains. In web-site design you have the luxury of offering a wide range of sections and features, because people can scan read an entire page in seconds. On IVR systems, everything has to be read out word for word, which can make it painfully slow to use. Be ruthless at pruning off less important features, to create a simple, clean menu hierarchy.

When a real person reads out a list, they tend to emphasise the items in the list differently, to give a sense of the beginning, middle and end of the list. This is called "prosody". For example, people tend to put an emphasis on the last item in a list. Your IVR should do the same when reading out menus. The best way to achieve this is to get your voice-over artist to record each menu in a single recording file, rather than recording them separately and then cut-and-pasting them together. The cut-and-paste approach tends to create an unfriendly, difficult to understand voice, and should be avoided. It is made worse when recordings are added by call centre staff at a later date, which gives an inconsistent and unprofessional feel.

A gap of more than 3 seconds can make a user think that something has gone wrong. However, a really short gap can make the menu seem "rapid fire" and difficult to use. There is no such thing as universally 'perfect' pacing, since it depends on the system in hand. Appropriate pacing of the system depends on the target user-group, the complexity of the feature set, and the regularity of use- will people use it daily, like voicemail, or will they be perpetual novices? User-testing is the best way of perfecting the pacing of your IVR.

There's no need to second guess what your users want nor how they will behave when exposed to your system. Build a prototype of your IVR and get some real users in, and watch them using it. Your prototype can be a simple mock-up where you have someone 'act out' the part of the IVR by reading it off a flowchart, or it can be an actual interactive prototype, which they call up using a real telephone. Also bear in mind that at Amberlight we offer high fidelity IVR prototyping and user-testing services, and we would be happy to discuss your needs.

There are a number of standards for IVR system design, such as HFES 200.4 and ISO/IEC 13714. We recommend you use them - your users will thank you for not making them learn yet another esoteric set of button short-cuts. Amberlight also offers expert review services where your IVR can be evaluated on the basis of these standards and other established usability guidelines.

On an IVR, audio is everything. Poor quality recordings, background noise, and untrained voice-over artists can create a really bad impression in the customer's mind, and give them the impression that they are learning a thing or two about how your company really works behind the scenes. It is advisable to hire a voice-over artist and use a recording studio that has had experience in recording for IVR systems. Finding the right voice-over artist with the right qualities for your branding can be difficult, since what you think is right, and what your customers think are two entirely different things.

Callers are a trapped audience and you know a few things about them. This means it is really tempting for marketing people to want to stick in a promotional message. However, you should bear in mind that your IVR is your worst customer touch point. Chances are, the caller is going to be feeling impatient and in a bit of a bad mood. Is this really the best time to try to sell or teach them something?

There is nothing more annoying than trawling through an IVR call routing system only to find out the department is closed - your user will be screaming "Why didn't you tell me this sooner!" New IVR platforms offer the ability for menus to adapt on the basis of 'knowledge' like this. So, for example, if your technical support department closes after 6pm but your sales department is open until 9pm, it is best for the IVR system to adapt the menu to reflect this (e.g. after 6pm), to save them a wasted journey.

 

Most users will try to 'muddle through' the system, and then only refer to the help menu when they are exhausted and at the end of their tether. However, there is a small but nonetheless important group of users who will refer to and rely on the help menu. This means that you have to provide a usable, user-tested help menu, but at the same time the system should be self evident and usable without requiring the user to refer to it. You should never use the excuse "But it's all explained in the help menu!"