Recently, Paul English made the news with his “IVR Cheat Sheet,” a Web site that lists shortcuts to allow customers to quickly escape from corporate IVR systems. The list is a clever idea, but for businesses it poses a serious question: How can companies realize return on their IVR investments without alienating customers?

In short, how do you keep customers on the phone?

“Paul [English] is dealing with customer frustration that is real,” admits Peter Mahoney, vice president of worldwide marketing for speech vendor Nuance . “There certainly are people who are frustrated with systems that don’t behave well and want the option to get to a live operator.”

And that’s fine, he says. According to Mahoney, providing the option to talk to a live operator shouldn’t be seen as an admission that the IVR system doesn’t work. He likens it to automated teller machines, where bank customers often use ATMs that are outside bank branches. They could go inside and talk to a teller, but they don’t. They prefer to use the ATM -- but they like having the option of speaking to a real person if something should go wrong.

Jeff Fried, CTO of IVR testing and monitoring company Empirix, believes that speech-enabled interfaces can successfully handle a much greater proportion of calls than they’re given credit for. The key is to make informed decisions in the initial design of the application, and then to constantly refine it with successive rounds of monitoring and use-case testing.

Indeed, many companies that have deployed IVR applications effectively have found that in practice customers prefer the automated system. According to Lou Orsi, director of vendor relations and strategic projects at online retailer 1-800-Flowers, surveys have shown that 75 percent of the company’s customers prefer using the IVR system for simple order status calls. The alternative, of course, is for customers to wait on hold for the next available live agent -- something that can alienate callers even more quickly than an automated application can.

“It’s quite feasible to make these systems work and work well and to keep them working,” Fried says. “But it’s way too common to neglect completeness, because you get a lot of value with something that isn’t quite complete. That’s something that can alienate callers, it can cost you a lot of money doing support, and that’s probably the primary reason that IVRs have gotten a bad rap in our culture.”