It’s one thing to want a more efficient business, but we can’t do it on the customer’s time or dime. Sure, our IVR systems increase efficiency, for example, but they also improve the customer experience (with a good call flow).

“Cost efficiencies are fine, but not at the expense of the customers,” writes customer relationship management (CRM) guru Paul Greenberg.

In one post, Greenberg details a nightmare flying experience where his flight was delayed, his bags were lost and the airline wasn’t entirely honest about getting him his bags back.

Greenberg writes that transparency is better in the long run with regard to customer service. Basically, it’s better to be honest about uncertainties than have a promise come back to haunt you.

“Customers may not like what they hear, but at least they can make a decision intelligently,” writes Greenberg. “By hiding the uncertainties, you take that ability away from your customers. Don’t.”

Customers want to know what’s up. Which is one reason why Plum has a fairly complicated explanation of our hosting IVR backup strategy right on our website.

For one thing, customers need to understand how crucial redundancy is to the uptime of a system. For another, if we’re claiming to provide 99.999% uptime on our hosted IVR systems, we should provide an explanation of how we do it.

According to Matthew Day of CRM Superstars (another CRM guru), “the lifeblood of any business has to be the data it holds…Information is what makes a business function—they are its intellectual resources and intellectual property.”

We agree, which is why we use endless redundancies in our system. The cost of redundancies falls well below the potential cost for a customer who loses their vital business data.

According to Day (and the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington), “93% of businesses that lose their company information due to a disaster and are unable to get access to it within 10 days, end up going out of business within the year.”

Yikes. Given that, we’re not worried at all about a little more cost, not if it means a stable system operating at 99.999% uptime. I’m sure our customers appreciate it.