Sorry I missed this two months ago, but in case you did too, TIME Magazine did an article titled What’s Next 2008: 10 Ideas That Are Changing The World, in which #2 is titled “The End of Customer Service”.  I’m not saying they got the idea wrong, but I certainly didn’t really agree with the slant the article took (but great picture at the top!)  Here’s the final paragraph from that piece: 

The less cheery way to look at it is that we’re doing the work of employees without being paid. “The company is more productive, but we’re shifting work to consumers. So from a macro perspective, are we more productive or less?” asks Mary Jo Bitner of the Center for Services Leadership at Arizona State University. And by adding all these new tasks to our daily routine, are we overstressing ourselves and reducing our quality of life? It’s an interesting debate. Just don’t expect to have it with a clerk.

Being in the IVR/call center business, the bulk of what we and the companies who are our customers work on is customer service… and there’s always a plethora of negative commentary surrounding self-service options in call centers when calling any company (or more specifically, the lack of human beings.)

The perceived lack of humans in phone interactions has also become routine, as TIME mentions, in many other customer service sectors — retail, airports, banks, etc.  However TIME somewhat twists this idea as good for the bottom line of companies, and consumers have simply started “playing along”, accepting the fate that they will now have to deal with computer kiosks instead of friendly humans.

Last I checked, as a consumer I wasn’t “playing along” with self-service, I was actively seeking it out!  Let’s think about it… would I (or you) rather:

1. Find out my gift card balance by quickly calling an automated system, punching in the numbers and having the balance read back to me in under a minute … or … call a toll-free number, wait on hold for 3-6 minutes for a “friendly” human (who is really cold as ice because he/she hates doing repetitive, routine tasks like telling someone their balance) and find out the same balance?
2. Walk or drive up to an ATM to get cash out, and walk away in 45 seconds … or … park, fill out a withdrawal slip, wait in line for a teller, feel slightly humiliated when they tell me I can only take out $60 instead of $100, then sulk away?
3. Walk up to a movie ticket kiosk, slide in my credit card, punch a button or two on the screen and get my tickets in under a minute … or … yet again, wait in line for a ticket teller, hand them cash, wait for them to get correct change, and hand me the same movie tickets?
4. Stroll into an airport, bypass the interminably long line at the ticket counter, slide my credit card into yet another computer kiosk and print my boarding pass in a minute (or better yet, do everything at home online!) … or … wait in that interminably long line which takes a solid 15 minutes, deal with yet another “friendly” ticket counter person, have them ask me a ridiculous amount of questions, and get my boarding pass??

Is there something about good/bad customer service that I’m missing here?  Do these scenarios sound like something that are only affecting the big, bad company’s bottom line??

Sorry, TIME, that’s my side of the debate.  While there are certainly instances where I have to (not necessarily want to) deal with humans, I’m actually reducing my stress and increasing my quality of life by using the things you say are the end of customer service.

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A great webinar we just published by my colleague Mike Ahnemann, Principal VUI Designer at Angel.com, on “Putting the Caller First,” where he provides guidelines on making your IVR application usable by callers, a fundamental concept that is relegated to an afterthought in many deployments.
View the webinar at: http://www.angel.com/resource-center/ivr-university/post-VUIdesign-webinar.jsp

We just came out with an exciting new integration with Parature, a leader in on-demand customer service software, that showcases just how unique of an offering we have at Angel.com.

The integration in a nutshell phone-enables the Parature on-demand customer service software. Using the newly release d Parature API, any application deployed on Angel.com’s Site Builder can interact with the Parature back-end to perform such actions as getting information about the caller, creating a new ticket and inserting it into Parature during the call, and getting the status of a ticket.

What this means, for instance, is that you are no longer forced to treat all callers the same. You can identify that a caller is a premium customer and then provide them with faster support than a regular customer. Also, you now give your callers the ability to open a ticket right over the phone if say no one is available over the phone to take the call (say all your agents are busy or customers are are calling after hours). Isn’t it much better to have the caller just speak to describe their problem and then have that description logged as a ticket right there and then, instead of asking them to hang up and then go log into the portal and log a ticket, etc.?

And how about the fact that as a manager, you have complete visibility into what is going on over the phone? You know who called, who got phone support, who logged tickets, etc.
Now on with how this solution showcases the unique strengths of Angel.com.

To begin with, once the Parature API was published late last year, enabling communication between Angel.com and Parature was a matter of building a voice site that had the right transaction pages and made the right calls to php scripts that interacted with the Parature API. From that point on, whenever a customer wants to deploy a Parature-enabled application, the process of deploying them consists in configuring variables and fields — no programming needed! (Unless the client wants to do something not covered in our out of the box functionalities.) In fact, we are putting together a library of transaction pages that customers can copy into their Angel.com account so that they can deploy their own Parature solutions without needing to talk to our professional services outfit! How cool is that!

Next, just a week before we announced our integration, we had come out with our VCC’08 offering — our next generation Virtual Call Center solution that comes fully integrated with our Site Builder. (If you have not taken the time to review the VCC’08 release, invest the time. It’s well worth it.)

What does this mean? Simply that if you have Parature, you can now, through Angel.com, provide phone automation and self service to your clients, treat your callers differently according to business rules that promote your bottom line, use our VCC offering right within your voice site, and have full visibility into what is going on in your phone support line. And do all of that right from the convenience of your browser, without having to write a single line of code! Where else can you do that?

And here’s the icing on the cake: the tickets that callers submit of the phone? The spoken description of those trouble tickets are sent out to SimulScribe to be transcribed in near-real time and then logged into Parature. (Click here to read more about our integration with SimulScribe.)

More to come as we continue building our Partner ecosystem….

Phone-based marketing.  What does that mean?  Well, it used to mean a bunch of call center reps calling everyone and their brother at dinner time to pitch them for some company.  Then we took the reps out of the equation and sent blast automated phone calls (still at dinner) with a company pitch.  Fast forward a couple of years in technology, and the expanded use of cell phones, and there are a plethora of ways to market to people through the phone.  I came across a couple of articles yesterday that spoke directly to how marketers are use various techniques, all centered around the phone. 

First I came across this article which describes NIKE’s use of toll-free numbers in promotions of all kinds — product info request lines, and numbers that let you “listen in” on sports superstars as they hype NIKE products.  This is a great example of pull marketing in which NIKE advertises and broadcasts these phone numbers, and customers (and potential customers) call the number to be fed the NIKE product schpiel.  Simple yet effective use of IVR.  And if they’re doing it right, they incorporate an IVR Store Locator so consumers can immediately find the closest NIKE store and go buy the shoes or apparel when the message is hot.

Next, as a regular reader of Larry Chase’s Web Digest for Marketers, I received his latest weekly newsletter, which listed a couple of new marketing techniques centered around the mobile phone (#1 in his 12 trends.)  He gives the example of the latest push marketing couponing techique being used by Subway (sandwich company) which employs SMS messaging.  Customers register online (or send an SMS from their cell) for Subway coupons, then Subway can “push” coupons (or any other branding I guess) their way at any time. So far it has proved to be VERY successful in the couple of cities in which they’ve rolled it out.

In this same Digest, Larry Chase touches on QR Codes which are being used successfully in Japan right now.  Companies place QR codes (souped up barcodes) on ads, posters in public transit areas, etc., then consumers take a cell phone picture of the code.  The software installed on the phone recognizes the code and displays various info (movie showtimes, product info) on the phone for the consumer. 

All of these are great examples of phone-based marketing.  Without cell phones, none of these work the way they should (or work at all.)  But, if you’re a marketer, which one is the best?  Which one are you going to use?

How about taking pieces from ALL of them?  The optimal, souped up, mobile marketing platform that I see is as follows:

1. Advertise a toll-free phone number with a call-to-action of getting coupons
2. Have consumers call the phone number from their cell when they see the ad, when it’s freshest in their minds
3. An IVR system gives a quick branding pitch then asks the caller to “opt-in” to all future marketing campaigns from your company
4. The IVR system then immediately gives them their first “coupon” or offer
5. The IVR then asks them if they would like to find the closest store to them and sends them to an IVR store locator
6. The system can also perform an automated name and address capture for future direct mail campaigns
7. Once the caller is opted-in with their cell, you can push SMS coupons or other QR-code-like information to their cells at any time

What’s better than that!?  Let me know what you think… post a comment, and thanks for reading!

Š

We recently announced the general availability of Virtual Call Center 2008, our ACD product. I wanted to stop by the blog (long time no see) and help people evaluating call center solutions to see some of the most unique aspects of this release:

#1 - VCC 08 is highly usable

The words “Call center software” are rarely mentioned in the same sentence as the word “usable”.

But VCC ‘08 is the product of 1 year of observations and 6 intense months of usability studies. The Angel team iterated over the design of the interfaces over 20 times and in each occasion we took input from users at our customer sites.

In this picture you see the hand of Hwi, our designer, simulating on paper actions being performed by a user (the hand of the user is holding a pen). This and other video techniques helped us try tens of combinations of interface concepts.

#2 - VCC 08 encourages bottom up collaboration

The basic principle of social software is that using it leaves a residue of value for someone other than the user performing the interaction with the software. That is a form of collaboration.

In the case of VCC 08, by the mere fact that Agents are interacting with the Agent Monitor (.ppt screenshots) they are creating value for others: their supervisors and call center management, as well as their other agent colleagues.

Say, for example, that you run a tech support line for a software company, and you suddenly start experiencing high levels of calls about a new bug.

With VCC 08 your tech support reps can create their own disposition codes on the fly. These codes are displayed in the VCC reports and a quick accounting of calls with these disposition codes can give you a sense of the magnitude of the impact of the bug on your customer base. (And the product management team at your company will think of you as a hero)

#3 - VCC 08 is highly respectful of your callers

One of the user stories we worked hardest at was transferring calls between Agents. This comes from the realization that many of our customers have to deal with calls involving multiple conversations.

In our research we found out that one of the top reasons of discontent among call center callers –beyond having to hold– is getting stuck in limbo when an Agent unsuccessfully transfers the call.

Transferring a call between Agents in VCC 08 is a carefully choreographed procedure that ensures that the call is successfully handed over. If the second Agent does not pick up for any reason, the call comes back to the first Agent.

For me, this is a feature that seeks to reinforce our belief that caller experience is paramount in any phone system.

#4 - VCC 08 is highly integrated with IVR, CTI, CRM and Call Recording

If you’ve ever seen Netsuite’s marketing (”One Integrated System to Manage your Entire Business”) you’ll recognize this principle: the notion that the value of any IT project can quickly be sapped by the costs and complexities of integration.

With VCC 08 you get pre-integrated IVR for automation, CTI for personalized call handling, CRM for managing touch points and call recording for quality assurance, all with zero integration costs.

You may find better solutions in the marketplace for any one of these areas, but you won’t find a better integrated solution that offers the mix of features that really make a difference in the day to day running of a call center.

#5 - VCC 08 treats agents like adults

I’ve seen my share of Orwellian call centers: places with high turnover, where every second counts, and where all responses are highly scripted. Generally speaking, in these call centers, the software is designed to enforce agent compliance, and to micromanage the time of an agent.

In contrast, we find that our customers run call centers with highly skilled multitasking agents, who truly care about customer satisfaction and operational excellence.

For them, we built call center software that treats agents like adults. Agents can, if so configured:

• Enter their own disposition codes and call notes
• Extend or shorten their wrapup times
• Specify their own break reasons

In other words: more than simply sharing the load among ‘worker bees’, we think about empowering knowledge workers with a tool that helps them collaborate effectively in providing the best possible service to their customers.

#6 - VCC 08 reaffirms our belief in the value of dynamic, data-centric configuration

Probably one of my favorite features in VCC 08 is the ability to configure Transfer Points from a spreadsheet or Data File. The idea is simple: an administrator can setup a job of uploading a spreadsheet with store information, or department information, or international office locations, or franchisees, or external referral partners or …. you name it… AND the Angel system will create a dynamic sidebar in the Agent Monitor that enables Agents to seamlessly transfer to those locations via a simple text search.

For me, this is the kind of empowerment that unleashes productivity in an organization, where a line manager no longer has to call IT for things that they can do themselves, on their own timeline.

In conclusion, the VCC 08 release marks a milestone for our company, in that it undeniable reaffirms our commitment to effectively competing in the hosted call center space, with all the twists that make the Angel.com offering a unique value proposition today.

Editor’s Note: This week we’re joined by guest writer Heather Johnson, a freelance writer on business, bootstrapping and customer services topics.  Many of these points are things you’ve heard before, but we can’t stress them enough! 

Unfortunately, some companies adopt Interactive Voice Response (IVR) without really considering the needs of their customers. When the company merely sees the new technology as a simple way to save time and money, the system is doomed for failure. There are several factors that set great IVR apart from poorly executed IVR.

If you’ve received a lukewarm reaction to your new system, then one or more of the following obstacles could be the culprit:

1. No Way Out – Yes, IVR can be convenient, but it isn’t perfect and there are times when a customer would really just prefer to talk to a human. If they can find no easy way out of the automated program, tensions will quickly mount.
2. Too Many Menu Options – Customers will develop a white-knuckled grip on their telephone when there are too many menu options. Don’t offer more than five per menu and don’t layer too many menus, lest the customers feel like they’re lost in a labyrinth.
3. Inaccurate Voice Recognition – Your IVR is only as good as its ability to understand the customer. If your IVR is rerouting most of your customers to a live agent after failure to recognize prompts, then you’ve essentially wasted everyone’s time by implementing the technology.
4. No Shortcuts – If you have returning customers who know exactly where they want to be in a menu, then you should have a way for them to cut right to it. Sitting through several prompts is only necessary for those who have never used the system before.
5. Long-Winded Script – How long do your prompts really need to be? Give your customers the benefit of the doubt and keep things pithy.

Heaven help the companies who are using bad IVR as their complaint department. A customer who is already annoyed could quickly become enraged when the above problems exist. Remember, IVR should be designed to make life easier for all parties. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and ask yourself how convenient your current system is.

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Heather Johnson is a freelance business, finance and economics writer, as well as a regular contributor at Business Credit Cards, a site for best business credit cards and best business credit cards offers. Heather welcomes comments and freelancing job inquiries at her email address heatherjohnson2323@gmail.com.

We’ve just launched an exciting new partnership with SimulScribe, one of the leading providers of near-real-time voice-to-text transcription, to power Angel.com applications that require fast transcription and automatic delivery via email or via a web service into a back-end, such as a CRM or a simple database.

Our first integration is powering our newly released salesforce.com solution, SalesByFone. In a nutshell, the application lets field salespeople call into their salesforce.com account and leave a note to themselves, or send an email to a contact, by just speaking, and then have their spoken message transcribed and saved to salesforce or emailed to their contact.

Imagine not only the time the solution will save field sales (compare the number of steps it takes to log a note about a meeting if done via traditional browser versus making a call and saying the name of the contact and then speaking the note), but also the new level of consistency in logging and tracking it will introduce in the routine of its users.

The obvious next integration using SimulScribe will revolve around support: mainly, transcribing support tickets and saving them into a support CRM back-end.

Stay tuned for the next integration and the next partnership announcement!

Elaborating on my post of last week regarding the troubled waters Gethuman is navigating….

I think the key to building a reform movement that will take hold and have a concrete and lasting positive impact is to assemble the right alliances from stakeholders who have a vested interest in pressuring businesses to invest in customer-centric solutions.

If you look back at all progress say in product safety that has been made, in almost every case, it has been a battle between on the one hand businesses that want to protect their short term interests and their margins by resisting anything that leads to production cost increases, and on the other consumers and their advocates who moved to pressure them to build safer products.

The classic example being of course the car seat belt and Ralph Nader’s crusade for automotive safety. Initially, there was great resistance to the seat belt, but eventually, companies realized that safety was a competitive advantage they could exploit (and did). And that turned out to be great not only for the companies who went the safety route, but for the automotive industry in general because it opened up a whole new market and new set of customers (safety conscious moms, older drivers, for instance) who had up to then been excluded.

The stakeholders in our case are consumers and their advocates, VUI designers (we want to have jobs and make money), companies that deploy IVR solutions (they want to build applications that will be adopted have a truly positive impact for their clients), integrators, companies that host the deployments, and companies that buy them and deploy them (our customers).

The challenge in our situation, I believe, is that the ultimate user is not the technology buyer, so, obviously, the interest of the buyer is not aligned with that of the consumer.

A strategy for moving forward, in my view, would look something like this:

(1) Educate consumer groups on the shabby state of deployed automation and support. That shouldn’t be too hard given the universal dislike of currently deployed IVR systems.  The key is to make them understand that the root cause are not technological limitations but simple business decisions.

(2) Educate consumer groups on the possibilities of the technology: they need to understand that a great deal of consumer pain can be alleviated if businesses invested in the deployment of quality speech solutions.

(3) Have consumer advocates pick one or two key features that can be delivered and that are most wanted by the consumer and agitate for their adoption. For example: telling the caller how long they need to wait when they are placed on hold, or never having the caller repeat information they give the agent.

(4) The features in (3) need to be (a) easily implementable (technology exists and it is not too expensive), and (b) easily monitor-able.

(5) Have the consumer groups establish watchdog units that will monitor and mobilize when the key feature in (3) is absent from an application.

(6) Enlist legislators that will serve as a Democles Sword. Nothing mobilizes an industry to do the right thing than the threat of legislated regulation.

(7) Build capacity: i.e., make sure that the supply of VUI designers meets the demand for them.

(8) Once the structures are in place for transferring best practices into actual deployments (after the initial strategic insinuation in mobilizing for (3)) and the investments needed to deploy quality solutions are systematically made, quality of deployments has no
way to go but up.

Gethuman in this scheme could fulfill the role of consumer advocate. They would be the agitators making demands for better solutions from companies that deploy IVR contact center applications. For this to be taken seriously, though, Gethuman would need to tone down its “bypass the IVR” gimick and make demanding better automation its central demand rather than doing away with automation….

Establishing a consortium of some sort that speaks on behalf of businesses that deploy IVR solutions would be a concrete first step to take.

A piece in Businessweek discusses how and why the gethuman project has not lived up to the revolutionary promises it made when it was launched in late 2005.

What happened? English learned that no matter how effective online consumer crowds may be, full-blown change still takes the passion and energy of committed individuals. “If you’re going to try to do a standard,” he says, “you need someone who is really going to drive it.” English admits his busy schedule as chief technology officer of fast-growing travel search engine Kayak.com played a part in the slowdown, but he never intended the site to take up much of his time in the first place: “I wanted the citizens of the Web to run this.”

Leading a movement is a thankless task that requires a great deal of passion and selfless sacrifice.

I suspect that Microsoft and Nuance pulled one of the oldest tricks that establishments pull when they need to neutralize an agitator: flatter them and pretend to join them.

Also: I think the main reason that English lost steam is that he had no strategy for reform: he agitated and that was that.

Agitating is useful and necessary. But reform requires a long-term program with the patient building of allies and the steady shaping of opinion.

But I don’t think his efforts have been in vain at all. The movement truly needs to be picked up from within the industries that deploy Speech IVR solutions with bridges to consumer watch dogs to put steady pressure on companies to invest in the deployment of quality speech solutions.

You’ve heard them enough times, and if you are like me, you cringe every time: “Your call is very important to us,” they say, and then they keep you waiting and waiting; “For English, press one,” they insist on telling you, even though you’ve called them a hundred times and every time you pressed – that’s right — one for English; then there are those little phrases you’ve heard so many times that your ears don’t event bother to pick them up any more – ones like, “You can interrupt me at any time” or “Please select from the following menu options.”

But there is one particular little gem that, in spite of the thick skin of my ears, still gets my goat. I’m talking about, “Please listen carefully as our options may have changed!”

When your IVR says that, what callers will hear is, “Please listen carefully as we don’t really care how awful our IVR is….” And that can’t be be good!

I would say 9 out of 10 of the IVRs I call these days have this phrase right there upfront, proudly played as if to signal that you are dealing with a company so dynamic and so cutting edge that its menu options are constantly changing – so, you’d better pay attention lest you get hurt.

The sad thing is that almost 100% of the time the phrase is played, nothing had really changed in the IVR menu for months – and in some cases, the phrase is inserted from the very beginning of the IVR deployment!

So wherefore the horrid little habit?

A good guess would be that it started legitimately enough when menus did change and power users skipped ahead without listening to the new options, resulting in confusion and complaint call backs about how the system was broken.

From that point on, my guess is that the context of the inclusion of the phrase falls into one of the two scenarios: (1) the voice user interface (VUI) “designers” were rank amateurs and therefore proceeded like all tentative amateurs do — that is, by playing it safe and methodically and carefully imitating “what is out there,” or (2) the VUI was designed by professionals who knew better than to perpetrate the atrocity but who were forced to include the phrase by adamant call center managers who perceive the IVR’s mission to be first and foremost keeping callers from reaching humans and are therefore willing to throw any verbiage at callers if it forces them to listen carefully to the instruction prompts – i.e., are willing to outright lie to callers about how the menu is constantly changing.

Case (1) is the easier to remedy: if companies were to systematically invest in hiring professionally trained VUI designers and would take the development of their IVR as seriously as they do their web site, the phrase will at long last set itself on the path of extinction.

Case (2) requires a bit of a struggle. If you are a VUI designer and find yourself battling an arrogant, all-knowing call center manager who insists on including the phrase, here is how I would suggest you proceed.

First, point out that power users do not listen to prompts – they know what to press and they start pressing as soon as they realize they are connected. They will certainly not notice the white noise language of, “Please listen carefully as our options have changed” — especially if it is played every time they call. The only way power-users will learn that an option has changed is for them to get lost once or twice.

Second, point out that even non-power users filter out the phrase if it is played every time they call. After a while, they will catch on that you are crying wolf and will simply tune out your pleas.

Third, propose that if there was indeed a drastic menu change and you desperately needed your callers to notice it, then at the very least, use something far more attention grabbing than flat language to signal the change: a double dings sound followed by an announcement that the menu options had changed, for instance, would be far more effective.

And to close the deal, explain to the call center manager that the best way to contain callers within the IVR is to ensure that they have a great experience with it every time they call it. What if the IVR were to remember who among the callers had already heard the menu change notification and then would act on that knowledge? For instance, noticing that the caller is calling for the first time since the menu change, the IVR would play the menu change alert and disable barge in, hence both ensuring that the caller notice that the menu had changed and forcing them to listen to the new options. And then, next time that person called, the IVR wouldn’t play the menu change alert again.

Wouldn’t that be more likely to minimize errors and misrouting than playing a phrase that is either not even noticed by the caller or, if noticed, can only needlessly annoy?

A blog I have started reading recently is Service Untitled. This is a great, active blog to read, with lots of very useful insights and information from people who truly care and think a lot about customer service.

Their latest post focused on self-service FAQs on the web and the author offered the following recommendations about what a good FAQ should be and should not be:

1. It should not be forced. Companies should never require their customers or users to use self-service. They can suggest it or make it more noticeable, but they should never force it.
2. It should be intelligent. FAQs and self-service options that are static are worthless. The systems should update based on popularity, helpfulness, etc. There should also be humans watching the self-service systems and how customers are using them. Use Google Analytics if your system doesn’t already have an analytics tool.
3. It should ask for suggestions. Like Google and LucasArts, good self-service centers should ask if articles were helpful, if they helped resolve issues, etc. To take it a step further, human representatives should ask if customers tried self-service. If they say no, ask why. The answers may be surprising.
4. It should be up-to-date. There are very few things that are less helpful than an out of date help center. Make sure yours stays up-to-date and contains relevant information.
5. It should be easy to navigate. It should also be easy to search. Make sure your help center is easy to navigate. It should be easy to go back, easy to explore relevant entries, and all of those good things.

Very interesting how the 5 requirements above closely match to some best practices in phone self service: (1) don’t hide the zero out option, (2) use information that you can gather about the caller and the context to serve them intelligently, (3) get feedback from callers and monitor caller satisfaction, (4) offer accurate information and solve caller problems, (5) make sure the call flow is coherent and rational (for instance, don’t drive people crazy with jumbled menus full of holes - “For Support, press 1, for sales press 7, for billing press 5,” etc.).

See more about this in an article I recently published in TMCNet: “Treat Humans Humanely and they Might Just Like IVR“.

A piece I wrote with Dr. Weiye Ma for the ASRNews newesletter came out earlier this week.

Here it is reproduced. Please consider subscribing to the newsletter. It’s chock-full of must-know information.

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Back to the Future: Bleeding-edge IVR

Imagine this: every Saturday morning, the first thing you do even before you fully open your eyes is to reach for your cell phone, fling it open, press the “9″ key, press the “Call” button, place the cell phone against your ear and engage an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system as follows:

System: Hi there! The last four digits?
You: 0817.
System: Ok. Hang on. Your balance is $5,235 dollars and 23 cents. Anything else?
You: No.
System: Great. Goodbye.

At which point you would flip your cell phone shut and then rollback to sleep. The whole interaction would have taken you between 20 and 30 seconds, no more.

Compare this to getting your information from the web. If you are like us and you use a desktop at home, it means you would have had to get out of your bed, walk to the room where the desktop is, turn the computer’s monitor on, click on the tab that points to your bank’s login page, type the login credentials, and then navigate to where your checking balance is displayed. After that, you log out from the account and bring the browser down (to minimize any security risks), switch the desktop’s monitor off, shuffle back to your bed, and finally get back to sleep. At the best, it would have taken you between 4 and 5 minutes.

What if you had a laptop? Well, maybe you would be able to shave a minute or so off, but only if you had the laptop nearby and it was connected to the Internet (which probably means that you have WIFI at home).

What if you had a PDA (Blackberry, Palm, iPhone, etc.)? You wouldn’t have had to get up from your bed, right? Yes, but have you tried navigating the Internet with any of those devices? At best, it is less than a gratifying experience, but usually it is downright painful. The iPhone has made great strides over its other PDA competitors in the display of web pages, but it took a step backward in information entry: it is relatively easier to type with a Blackberry or a Palm than it is with an iPhone. “Relatively easier,” because typing with the Blackberry or the Palm is no trivial skill to acquire.

So, then, it turns out that the most cutting edge technologies (desktops, laptops, PDAs) do not compare well at all with our humble phone when it comes to the simple task we described above.

What does it tell us? Simply that IVR technology is here to stay. It is here to stay because for certain tasks, it can do the job cheaper, more quickly, and require less effort on the part of the end user, than any of the most cutting edge communication technologies out there today.

But then you ask: so why do people hate IVRs? Why do they groan and shake their head in dismay when they realize that they are about to interact with a machine over the telephone?

The answer is simple: because most IVRs are atrociously designed. The interaction we described above is not your typical exchange between a user and an IVR system. Your typical IVR would have greeted you with some 30 seconds of chest-thumping messaging about the company, followed by some mindless instructions, such as, “For English, press 1,” or “Please listen carefully as our menu options have changed;” would have listed a long menu of options, would have required you to select the “check balance” option, then the “checking account” option, then would have required you to enter your full checking account number, then, for security purposes, a pin, and only then would have finally given you the balance. A grueling 3 or 4 minutes would have gone by – and you would have had to get up from your bed and retrieve your checking book, unless you were so organized as to have the checkbook near by, or had committed to memory your 14-digit checking account number – etc!

So, what did it take to have the IVR system we described initially to behave as it did?

Here are the keys to its effectiveness: (1) it recognized who the caller was, (2) it knew that they were calling to retrieve their checking account balance, (3) it did not waste time talking, but said only what it needed to say, no more, and (4) it let the caller speak back their answers.

Can this interaction be implemented with today’s technology? Absolutely. With the caller ID and the last four digits of the caller’s checking account (easy to memorize, especially if you are calling once a week), the user can be identified and validated, and the checking account balance retrieved and spoken back to the user in a matter of seconds. With some intelligence in the back-end (a simple Naïve Bayesian algorithm would amply do), the system can quickly learn by itself that every Saturday morning, this particular customer will call to ask for their checking balance. With that knowledge, the system can adapt its interaction to shorten all of its verbal prompts to the bare minimum (e.g., “The last four digits” rather than “The last four digits of your checking account number”), ask only for the information needed to accomplish its task, and then execute that task. And with the current state of Speech recognition, letting the user speak back the last four digits of their account and say “No” are trivial tasks.

There is no reason, then, why every IVR system deployed out there today cannot be as effective as the one described above. Give the people a system that helps them, that solves their problem without wasting their time, and they will use it and love it every time.

Dr. Ahmed Bouzid heads the Partnerships program at Angel.com. Dr. Weiye Ma is an independent speech consultant. They are authors of the VUI Post blog at http://www.thevuipost.com

Being in the IVR industry, I’m exposed to all types of voice applications all the time.  What we at Angel.com find most interesting is the continuous stream of new and unique voice mashups that companies are releasing all the time.  Most people think of IVR (or any voice app) as the standard “credit card balance” line, or the nasty barrier between you and a customer service rep.  But everything has changed as of late (and by “late” I mean the last couple of years.) 

Take the continued massive use of cell phones, add in extremely integrative voice technologies like Angel.com, combine the two with some sort of web service, and out pops a new voice/data mashup that can be fun, useful, and generally everything that your standard notion of an IVR application is not.

Here are some of the latest unique examples of voice mashups that I’ve come across.  Most, if not all, of these take your standard IVR system and mash it together with the web and other data.  Some of these were found on this blog post.  (Note: While not all of these were built using Angel.com… they could be!)

1. Pinger:  Send voice messages to one or more mobile phones.  Essentially verbal text messages.
2. Jott:  Email yourself reminders, email others, blog, set calendar events and more over the phone.  Voice messages are automatically transcribed and sent.
3. PayPal by Phone:  800-4PAYPAL allows you to send money to others - friends, colleagues, etc. - by text message or by voice by calling the number.
4. Mozes: Music and social network, allows you to call and leave voice messages for various artists, messages are then populated onto the website. You can also receive voice messages from these artists.
5. Popularity Dialer: Preset incoming phone calls that are sent to your phone at a predetermined time to help you get out of a meeting, date, etc.
6. GrandCentral:  Your own free phone number that, when dialed, rings all of your other phones at the same time so you never miss a call and others don’t have to hunt for you.

Have you come across others that foot the bill of a voice mashup?  Let us know about them by leaving a comment!

Nothing unnerves a user more than an irrational machine. Every instance of inconsistency by the system will occasion the user to ask, “Why is the system behaving like this? Did I miss something or is the system just badly designed?” Obviously, such questioning can only hurt the user’s confidence in the system’s ability to help them solve their problem.

In Language: Be consistent in how you refer to objects, properties and actions across prompts and menus. Don’t use “ticket” in one prompt and “case” in another; “incorrect” in one and “invalid” in another; “log in” in one and “sign on” in another.

In Voice: Avoid mixing DTMF with recordings; and avoid using more than one voice in your VUI.

In modality: If the user can speak their answer in one menu, don’t take that ability away from them in another menu, unless you explain to them why you are taking it away from them.

Across menus: If you let the user request “repeat” in one menu, don’t take that ability away from them in another menu.

Across contexts: If users are responding to an infomercial and the infomercial tells the viewers that by calling the line they will get to a sales agent, then make sure that the IVR does not offer options that have nothing to do with sales: e.g., offering them to be connected to the help desk or to billing.

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IVRs don’t need to be the bane of call center callers if designed with the principles outlined: be respectful, be intelligent, and be consistent. Have the IVR treat the caller with respect, give the system the intelligence and information it needs to treat each caller as an individual with specific needs, and ensure that the system’s behavior is consistent, rational, and predictable, and you will see the abiding hatred callers seemingly have for IVRs evaporate.

I just read a nice post on the Marketing Productivity Blog on a topic I/we’ve known for quite some time, but probably never put into words.  To summarize, here’s a snippet from that post…

Fact is, an IVR is a technical interface to humans, just like a web site is.  And just like many web sites, it was probably built and programmed by some engineers without a lot of direction from Marketing or Customer Service.  There’s really no reason at all why the folks optimizing the web site should not also optimize the phone system too - especially if they do a good job with the web site! 

All of this is related to VUI Design, as is the topic of a lot of the posts on this blog.  The concept seems pretty simple… apply to the phone all the best practices discovered in the countless web usability studies done over the past 15 years. (As an aside, here’s a great resource for web usability studies.)

But wait… wasn’t the phone around BEFORE the web?  Why aren’t we using all of the best practice studies done on phone usability?  When you find a phone usability study that is worthwhile before even 10 years ago, let me know.  Fact is, a phone was a phone back then, and IVR or any kind of automation was a thing for massive companies, and all built by the Operations team.  Once the web hit, people kind of abandoned the phone for quite some time.  In recent years, companies have come to realize that the phone is still a MAJOR touch point for their customers; additionally, phone technologies really took off and companies had more options with what to do with it to make it more than just a two-cans-and-a-string connection between two people.

So, companies picked up right where they’d left off 10 years ago with their phone, and the Operations team put together very similar phone systems that were seen 10 years prior.  Not good… enter poor usability, poor customer satisfaction, and rebellion against the now widespread use of phone automation.

This doesn’t mean we should abandon the phone again.  We should do what we did with the web… and make it BETTER and more USABLE.  The first websites out there, and the first web ordering systems were pretty awful.  Customers didn’t like them and didn’t trust them.  Did companies abandon the web?  Hardly.  They made it better… and then better… and then better still… until their customers actually preferred it over going to a store. 

Who made the web better?  Sure, Operations teams all over the country had a hand in it… Marketers certainly don’t understand all the coding behind making a web order system work.  But Marketers sure understand what their customers like.  And even more, CUSTOMERS understand what customers like. 

So take a tip from those who have come and studied before… enlist the help of your Marketing team in developing language and call flow for your IVR system.  After all, Marketers are typically pretty good with the spoken word, but they have a good sense of what the most important issues to your callers may be based on the analytics they see from the website.

And… don’t forget to use your customers as one of the best resources for how to design your phone system.  Done right, you can change the tune of the customers who call your IVR system, just like was done with the web over the years!