How we’re making it easier for people to get the right help when they call us
We tested improving our interactive voice response to direct people to the right help faster
Co-authored by Clare Villalba, Service Designer; Magda Sabatowska, Assistant Service Designer; Lyndsey Johnson, Senior Product Designer
At Citizens Advice we offer free, confidential advice in person, over the phone and online. But when coronavirus hit, our face-to-face advice services closed almost overnight and we saw an increase in demand on our digital and phone channels.
As part of meeting this increased demand, we wanted to improve our phone experience. In particular, we wanted to see if we could improve our interactive voice response (IVR) to direct people to the right help faster.
Our challenge
As Citizens Advice has grown over the years, we’ve started offering some specialist phone services, like advice about consumer issues or help with claiming Universal Credit. These run alongside our Adviceline service which covers general advice topics. This means that sometimes callers to our Adviceline phone line wait to speak to an adviser who then needs to forward them to another adviser in a specialist service.
We currently use IVR to connect someone when they call for advice. IVR is a prerecorded message that asks for user input (e.g. press 1) or lets people know their place in the queue. When we set out with a goal of improving the user experience when people phone us we knew:
- We can deliver good advice over the phone
- Lots of people need advice at the moment and it can take a while to get through
- People want their issue resolved during their first call
Our approach
We know many other organisations ask clients upfront why they’re calling, but we didn’t know if this would be suitable for our service where the people calling are in stressful situations or need help with more than one problem. For example, someone might be calling about being evicted from their home because they lost their job due to being discriminated against at work.
Before we invested too much in the technology, we wanted to see what the people we help would think of this idea. So we:
- Identified opportunities by looking at our data and talking to different experts, including our operations and expert advice teams
- Collaboratively prioritised opportunities that would have the most value for the people we help and the most opportunity for us to learn. The top ideas being to:
a. Update our IVR content to align with our style and branding
b. Use IVR interaction to direct people to the right help faster - Got to work!
Getting the foundations right
The IVR messages on our phone service were pretty old and complicated. We’re really good at using content design principles to make our website clear and easy to understand, so why weren’t we using them on our phone service too?
By using a content design approach, we were able to make the messages clear and easy to understand. People who come to us for help often have a lot on their minds — we don’t want to make them think too much about navigating our phone system.
3 things we did:
1. Used our in-house style guide — this gave a consistent tone of voice. It’s straightforward, friendly and positive
2. Used plain language — making messages easier to understand, especially for people whose first language isn’t English
3. Considered the order of words — e.g. ‘For information about other services, press 4’. The action ‘press 4’ is where it’s most useful and requires less memory recall
Recommendations
We did a round of idea generation on how we could use IVR to direct our service users to the right help faster.
2 key ideas emerged:
- Ask an open question: ‘So we know the best way to help you, tell us in a few words what you need advice about’ (or)
- Use a numbered menu: ‘So we know the best way to help you, tell us what you need advice about. If it’s about money or debt press 1, if you need help applying for Universal Credit press 2, if it’s about a house you own or rent, or if you’re homeless press 3, if you’ve been discriminated against at work or at your place of study press 4, if it’s about something you’ve bought or a service you’ve received press 5, if you need advice about something else press 6.’
We wanted to know what the people we help thought of being automatically directed by our phone IVR. From trying out our phone scripts with our service users we found:
- People have a good understanding of what they need and how to describe it
- A list of options was trusted and preferred for now
- Most people would be happy to use an IVR menu as long as it gets them to the right person, but some would be put off by it
- People want the IVR to be fast, easy to understand and reassuring
- There’s potential for asking an open question in the future, to better direct those coming to us for help
What’s next?
We’ve started a small pilot on one of our phone lines to see the impact of an IVR list of options to direct people. So far we’ve seen promising results with more people being sent to the right place sooner. We’ll keep monitoring this to learn if:
- Our callers are successfully directed to the right help
- It’s faster for people — e.g. it reduces wait times
Before we implement it more widely, we’ll do some more exploration to see if we’re confident our callers can direct themselves to the right support. We also want to develop a pathway that supports those who prefer to explain their issue to an adviser rather than a recording. In the future, we might also explore open questions further.
The most important thing we learnt from this testing is that good user experience is for everything, not just digital products. In this case, it’s designing a human-centred IVR to get people to the right help faster.