I read with delight your post this morning. I appreciate your invitation to respond to your blog, but you do such a great job covering the subject that it’s hard to find an aspect to comment on.

Because I have worked in individual health insurance area at BCBSV, I do have a couple of areas where I think I can make a contribution. Your comment about IVR’s and monitoring are very interesting and I have the following comments.

First, I don’t see executives being disciplined enough to consistently monitor. I did routinely monitor when I ran the individual department out of Roanoke, VA, and I learned very early on how much power there was in listening to your customers, CSR’s and sales people. When you hear who is calling into your shop, you discover lots of things. You discover product needs; you discover good vs. bad customers service techniques; you discover good vs. bad sales techniques; and you discover new campaign strategies among others. At least you think you have made these discoveries and there in lies the problem of having executives do the monitoring. Because all you have discovered is a theory or hypothesis, but in your position as the leader you make can changes that you think will make a difference. I believe these theories and/or hypothesies are very valuable, but they need to be tested, and that’s where we fall down as executives. The discipline of monitoring needs to be extended to disciplined testing to find out if your ideas are in fact the right things to change.

Second, with regard to IVR’s, I have found that IVR’s produce less than desired results, particularly when it comes to customer satisfaction, because we failed to do a good job in the initial development stage of implementation. I believe that IVR’s can produce exceptional customer satisfaction and reduce cost if we are willing to invest time and energy upfront during implementation, and then follow through with after implementation validation. Customers want to be routed to the right person to solve their problem quickly, and IVR’s can do that at a much lower cost than CSR’s if they are designed properly. By researching how others have used IVR’s and mapping out as many types of customer and prospect inquire as possible, you can build a tree that provides the 80% solution. But it’s only the 80% solution, and now someone needs to monitor how the solution is performing and how it can be improved. One can check the performance by looking at the statistics of the phone system, looking for abandon rates, the number of transfers per call, and most importantly, calling customers to see why they abandoned the call or why they needed to be transferred after the IVR distributed their call.

So while I believe it is important for executives to walk in their customer’s and agent’s shoes to understand how to improve performance, I also believe that testing, and a disciplined follow through on new ideas and technical installation will provide facts that allow executives to not engage in a slot machine management style of leadership.