[If you haven't read part one, please start here]

Another source of notoriety has been Paul English, a man who, apparently has a day job and almost no call center experience outside his own "customer-ness". His variation on being a SEAC has to do with his pique at IVR systems. They annoy him. Specifically, those that don't easily offer a way to bail out to a human agent annoy him.

As a result he has created something of a cottage industry out of teaching people how to bail out of IVR systems. He publishes a list of the exit codes for the IVR systems in many of corporate America's most famous companies. He's also become the spearhead of a "standards" group that aims to tell call centers how best to organize their IVR call flow.

While we may want to give him points for ingenuity and even a pat on the back for being so darned subversive in the name of customer empowerment, there are some startling flaws to the logic and methodology inherent in this approach.

It raises costs in small, imperceptible ways that aren't apparent to the caller, but make themselves felt over time. IVR and self-service tools are there because the cost of providing agented service to every caller is prohibitively high. IVR is designed to fend the repetitive and automatable away from the agent because it just doesn't make sense to pay an agent to do the boring job of telling you what your bank balance is. That's not the best use of an agent's time, and agents are expensive.

Also, if you can reduce the overhead cost of customer service by automating these chores, then you may be able to build in price reductions in the product or service you're selling. The provision of self-service allows a company to offer better, more reliable and cheaper products.

If you want a quality interaction when you need it most (i.e., when the complexity of the interaction requires human understanding and intervention), then you have to be prepared to accept an automated interaction when you really don't need a human. Encouraging people to bail on an IVR system teaches them to do something that's not in their long term interest, because it raises the overall costs of providing a level of good service. You may be able to jump to the head of the line by typing in a special code, but that's a little bit like low-grade insurance fraud - you may not pay the price right now, but everyone around you will pay slightly higher premiums because of your behavior.

It's a little like teaching people to be selfish. I wouldn't argue that people should stay trapped in a poorly designed IVR jail. But I do think there's a preponderance of evidence that most automated systems for self-service are well-designed, follow basic guidelines, and don't cause people to faint out of frustration and despair.

The other significant problem with the logic of the anti-IVR position is that it elevates the outlier to the status of the everyday. An interaction complex enough to require agented assistance is one that should be seen as a special case, one lying on either end of the customer satisfaction bell curve. The normal pathway to an agent, by having some issue too complex or unique to be handled by IVR, ensures that the call center will have the opportunity to flag and parse the complex and unique problem, add it to the knowledge base, and pay special attention to a customer who may need it.

But if everyone is special, then no one is special. If every problem or customer issue is complex and unique, then no problem is. If you take away the call center's ability to triage customer issues into various buckets labelled "critical" and "not so critical" by bailing on every IVR you come across, you create a recipe for broadly mediocre service. Which I suspect is not what Paul English or those who agree with his prescriptions really want.

The SEAC series so far:
Part 1: What's a Super-Empowered Angry Customer?
Part 2: How Paul English Aggregated Customer Discontent
Part 3: Thomas Friedman and the Flat World
Part 4: When the Center Is Fine, But the Policies are Broken
Part 5: To Understand Angry, You Must Understand Happy