• Angel.com customer announced as CIO 100 Winner. Kudos! Call center, screen pops, $$ savings and more. http://bit.ly/MGz2C #
• @FitnessConcepts Nice work, glad it’s working for you! Direct link to the virtual receptionist is http://www.angel.com/vr. in reply to FitnessConcepts #
• Research shows giving choice of keying or speaking responses in IVR survey increases likelihood they’ll take survey http://bit.ly/fsie1 #

Cloud.  I’ve been hearing that word a lot lately, and I mean a lot!  Cloud telephony, service cloud, sales cloud, cloud computing, SaaS cloud, telephony in the cloud… the list goes on.  But what does that really mean?  I’ve been putting the Angel.com logo in a cloud icon in PowerPoint presentations for years (hence the image)… does that mean we were the original cloud telephony provider, or the revolutionaries in the cloud space? 

The first big place I really ran face first into the “cloud” world was at Dreamforce 2008.  Salesforce.com used “cloud” in all their banners, and even hired people to walk around San Francisco with giant inflated cloud balloons tethered to their backs.  And since that time, salesforce has rolled the cloud theme into everything they do, including the main headings on their website. 

Lately, there has been an explosion of the use of “cloud” in our space — that being telephony (IVR, call center, etc.) – with the likes of Twilio, Tropo and Cloudvox most directly, and Voxeo, IfByPhone, etc. in subtext.  The notion that cloud represents is, to boil it down as I see it, the ability to access any solution you want, from any where you want, at any time you want — not being tied to hardware or installed software somewhere — and the ability to easily intermingle different types of solutions so everything works in conjunction.  I’m sure there are better definitions out there, and I may just be plain wrong in mine, so feel free to add your definition in the comment section. 

Dave Michels gives some interesting commentary on all of this on his Pin Drop Soup blog… “powerful cloud based tools for voice enabling web applications.”  Let’s see… does Angel.com fit the cloud mold:

• Hosted service that can be accessed/managed from any web browser any where — CHECK
• API to connect voice to any web service — CHECK (had web service stuff for years)
• Fully integrated with other cloud services such as CRM, workforce management, payment gateways, etc. — CHECK (again, had this for years)
• Internal/external database integration — CHECK (years again)
• Cool customer integrations that make use of mobile apps and other ‘hot topic’ things — CHECK

What else do we need to be “cloud certified”?  All this and you don’t need a programming degree to do it (we have a nifty GUI that does all the code for you.) 

But, with all that, I have to ask… Is “cloud” here to stay, or is it the “maverick” of 2009?  Seems like “Voice 2.0″ was replaced by “cloud telephony” within a year, so what will next years buzz word be!?  “Angel” and “cloud” go hand in hand, so I guess I’ll throw our hat into the cloud ring too.

###

• Angel.com article on Call Center Times website — Putting The Caller First: Effective IVR Design for Your Call Center http://bit.ly/StmfX #
• New (well, April) Gartner research predicts 75 percent of contact centers will be running a SaaS application by 2013. #
• Added a new RSS feed to our mix… the Angel.com IVR Wiki/Knowledgebase… http://feeds2.feedburner.com/IVRWikiUpdates #
• @dunwoods Angel.com can handle all of this…hosted IVR provider with SMS and web survey integrations. http://bit.ly/9nFhZ or 888-692-6435 #

• Frost & Sullivan eBroadcast on “golden nugget” tips for contact center professionals… http://bit.ly/WfwbA #
• RT @SpeechTech: Latest STM News: Angel.com Releases Spring Forward http://bit.ly/eSzR0 #
• Angel.com Virtual Receptionist mentioned on WSJ SmartMoney — “make a small business look bigger” — http://bit.ly/j4dda #
• Press Release on Angel.com Spring Release: “Spring Forward makes it easier for businesses to “put the caller first” — http://bit.ly/swJGH #
• RT @tmcnet: Angel.com’s Site Builder Toolkit Lets Novices Design, Deploy and Manage a Customized IVR System http://tmcnet.com/7668.1 #
• RT @tmcnet: Angel.com ‘Springs Forward’ with New IVR Enhancements http://tmcnet.com/7761.1 #
• Angel.com’s President, Dave Rennyson featured in The Washington Post “New at the Top” Section — http://bit.ly/qQ5b5 #
• Angel.com 2009 Spring Forward Release is here! Learn more about how it helps you “put the caller first” — http://bit.ly/xo1DI #
• Great article and case study on Angel.com customer Lifebooker, and Outbound IVR on Speechtechmag.com today… http://bit.ly/XPQiF #
• General article about Angel.com’s Site Builder tool on TMCnet today … http://bit.ly/Nh8N1 #

We put out our Spring Release 2009 this past weekend.  Aptly named “Spring Forward” because it was designed to address some major features our customers were asking for as well as propel our platform toward even more major releases due later this year.

But the crux of the release was based around our desire to “put the caller first” in everything, and every voice solution, we do and build.  What does this mean?  Well, in the words of Dave Rennyson (President, Angel.com):

“We’re using this phrase ‘putting the caller first’ because if we put the caller first—for our direct customers—and we help them build better IVRs, we help the industry, we help people build better applications, and we help ensure that their customers are served better.”

For more information on our Spring Forward Release, please visit the following pages:

Spring Forward Press Release >>

Spring Forward Announcement >>

Spring Forward Interview with Dave Rennyson in Speech Technology Magazine >>

Tips on handling sound files with your Angel.com account:

1. Because you can have “extra” phone numbers in your account for only a minimal charge, put one of them to regular use with your own staff:

• running a development copy of your voice site before you release the changes to the public on your main number(s)
• having a place to test changes
• playing with and learning more features of SiteBuilder!

2. Test new and old phrase recordings yourself, over the phone; not only on your computer. Put them into a simple greeting page or question page on a test site, in your own Angel account, and listen through them all for tone and pacing. Be sure your phrases make the intended effect and are intelligible over a variety of phones and situations:

• conventional phone in a noisy room
• cell phone from a vehicle
• speakerphone
• cell phone from an area with bad service
• caller distracted by something else, not paying 100% attention to your Angel application!

3. Some audio editing tasks are very easy: such as cutting off unwanted space, taking out a few words, adding a bit more breathing space between clauses, adjusting volume, or cloning half a sentence from another prompt. Excellent free editing tools are:

• Audacity ( http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ ) for editing WAV files
• Switch ( http://www.nch.com.au/switch/ ) for converting sound files to various formats

Rather than requesting fresh recordings (usually 5 to 10 business days) where recycled or slightly adjusted phrases would be sufficient…do it yourself with these tools! It is fun, and you might be able to deliver good results in 15 minutes, for free.

4. Run every set of recordings through Switch to be sure they are in the correct format, and optimized for best sound on your Angel.com phone system. If phrases sound static-y on the phone, wrong formatting is probably the culprit. Here are the proper settings:

• Output Format / Wave Encoder Option: PCM Uncompressed, 8000 Hz, 16 bits, Mono
• Options/Conversions tab, Audio Processing: Normalize files when converting, with peak level = 70%

5. Whether it’s an IVR system, a musical performance, telling a joke, or getting a child’s attention: timing is extremely important in the delivery. Your chief weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency…no, strike that, your chief weapon for IVR is a short silence.

Using Audacity, make a set of three “spacer” sound files that are nothing but silence, with lengths 500 milliseconds, 1000, and 2000.  Use these silences throughout your Angel.com voice site wherever a short pause would make your system’s delivery more easily understandable to your callers:

• Before or after pronouncing data from a variable
• Wherever you especially want the caller to pay attention to the phrase that comes next (grab the attention with a second of silence)
• Wherever you want to give the callers a moment to think about or process what you just told them, such as a phone number or URL you want them to write down
• At the beginning of a menu (1 second of silence is much more effective than inserting any cliched message begging for attention “as our menus have changed”)
• Between the options within a menu, giving a moment where the callers can decide if that’s the one they want
• Wherever the topic of your presentation is changing, such as a paragraph break within a Frequently Asked Questions message
• More!

• Almost forgot… updated the design of the Angel.com IVR blog a few days ago… http://bit.ly/FxMwK Let us know what you think. #
• Angel.com’s Spring Forward Release is coming this weekend! Stay tuned for more… #
• Ahmed Bouzid currently speaking at Parafest: “Best of Both World’s” - How to Seamlessly Integrate telephone IVR with Parature Software. #
• On our way to Parafest. Join Angel.com in the Solutions Center for a demo. Learn more about phone-enabling Parature http://bit.ly/Sy8ho #
• Just returned from awards banquet at UNC Chapel Hill. The exemplary university IT help desk in North Carolina, using Angel.com of course! #
• http://www.BlogTalkRadio.com. Lets anyone create a streaming audio show from their phone that in turn can be heard online or by phone. Cool! #
• And while on the LinkedIn Groups topic… VUI group started by our own VUI Evangelist Ahmed Bouzid — http://bit.ly/Y01Hn #
• LinkedIn SaaS Group, in case you haven’t seen it. Good discussions of SaaS technologies and how people are using them– http://bit.ly/ZsOEc #

I just returned to Angel.com after a 3-year Sabbatical that took me to Wharton, among other places….  In the interim, Angel.com has come out with some cool features that help the VUI designer “Put the caller first”.

So, I took it upon myself as my mission to understand how our product and services provide the capabilities to truly “Put the Caller First”.  A client developer of ours made the following comment in an email about a product gap:  “No ‘Confirm If-Necessary’ ability.  Most speech offerings allow apps to confirm if the confidence level comes back in a middle zone between rejecting and accepting the utterance.  For [Client A], we either have to set a page to confirm always, or risk false accepts, which will eventually cause a concern.”The truth of the matter is we do have this ability, but it’s just buried within the application on our “Question Pages”!  Which lead inevitably and inexorably to an educational feature series that I will be forming around enabling our users to “Put the Caller First”.

Angel applications have an ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) setting called confidence level set to .45 (or 45%) which means that the application assigns a confidence level to everything a caller says to it and accepts responses that it is at least 45% confident it knows what you have said.

Imagine if you are in a noisy room, and someone responds to a question that you ask and you are not sure you heard them correctly – you would subconsciously assign a confidence level to what you heard, and may ask them to repeat what they said.   However instead of asking them to repeat what they said, you may just say, “I heard you say [response], is that right?” building confidence in them that you are actively listening.

Angel has the ability to do this through the use of adjusting the confidence level, turning on confirmation, and finally adjusting the confidence threshold. This is by default set at 1 when you turn on confirmation making everything confirmed regardless of how confident you are in the response.

Below is a simple guide on how to do this:

In this example we have an app where getting the response right is important but not 100% critical, and quality of the experience by speed is equally important.  If we are 75%+ confident in the response we just accept it and move on.  We only reject the response when we are less than 25% confident, forcing them to a no-match error.  Finally between 25-75% confidence, we politely let them know what we think they asked for, and ask them to confirm or deny that.  Here we are “Putting the Caller First”.

In the future we will be exploring ways to capture confidence levels into variables to enable creative things (i.e. cool things with logic pages, improved customer analysis and tuning through enterprise reporting, etc).

Following up on my IVR polling post from August, I wanted to mention that Rasmussen polls, who use IVR to collect their data, tied with Pew Research as the most accurate pollster for the 2008 general election. And though the ‘Bradley effect’ was certainly a concern with pollsters, it wasn’t a concern for Scott Rasmussen who was quoted in a USA Today article, “If people aren’t going to vote for an African American, they’ll tell us.”

Yes, because ‘us’ is a machine.

This report has been out a few weeks but definitely worth a late mention.

According to Datamonitor, the North American market for hosted outbound IVR is set to grow from an estimated $213 million in 2008 to $524 million by 2013. Spending is expected to increase at a rate of 20% per year for the next five years as organizations adopt automated outbound calling to reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction.

From CIO magazine’s “Advice & Opinion” section:“While premises-based systems require large upfront capital investments and periodic upgrades, (not to mention time-consuming development and change request cycles) hosted systems’ software-as-a-service (SaaS) model involves a low up-front investment, and pay-for-performance pricing. According to McKinsey & Company, economics favor a hosted model over CPE-based IVR, even when ongoing costs are calculated. The firm estimates the traditional “do-it-yourself” model has a productivity of 60-70 cents to the dollar, while the SaaS-enabled model has a productivity of 20-30 cents on the dollar – a 50 to 70 percent improvement. The Yankee Group concurs, reporting that savings can range from 28-45% for organizations that choose a hosted call center solution.”

How’s the front door of your company’s phone presence in the world?

Here’s a useful little test.  Every week, assign two or three people from your own company to call into your own phone line.  Not the same people every week.  Rotate it.

Take notes on the total user experience.

If there was a transfer to an agent, how long did it take?

Were there any obvious problems with the automated prompts that could be fixed with a common-sense approach?  Or, any more profound problems that might require some consulting?  (It is your company’s own front door, on the phone, so things “should” run correctly!)

If your own CEO leaves a voicemail message in the company’s system, how long does it take for the promised callback?

Did the call get dropped at any weird place?

Was there anything that a brand-new customer, or a potential customer, would find confusing or off-putting?

The customers might not be able to report problems to you, and might not bother to do so.  Competitors certainly won’t.

Have fun!  Break your own system and find any problems before your customers do! 

Does your phone attendant have any of these greatest hits?

“Please listen carefully, as our menu options have changed.”  — Who knew?  Who memorized them?  Who even cared, beyond the company serving them up?  What’s the punishment if the caller doesn’t listen?  Put yourself into a restaurant where your waitress says: “Please listen carefully, as our salad dressing options have changed.  For House, press 1.  For Ranch, press 2.  For French, press 3.  For Poppy Seed, press 4.  For Vinaigrette, press 5.”  No tip for you, one year!  (And is that House dressing flavored like bricks, wood, or is it musty carpet?  If you don’t give me any clues what it tastes like, but just give me your own cryptic keyword or title, how can I make any intelligent choice for or against it?)

Convoluted, impenetrable, obfuscatory, constipated bureaucratic verbiage – please just don’t.  Your company wants me off the phone, quickly.  I want to be served quickly, and off the phone.  We’re in this together.  Give me straightforward choices where I don’t have to use my doctorate to figure out the sentences.  Prompt me with English at a third-grade reading level, no higher.  I’m not looking at your sentences on paper; I’m hearing them sequentially on the phone (like a radio broadcast), and I can’t fast-forward with my eyes or ears.  Keep it simple.

Three nouns in a row, or three adjectives in a row, on the phone.  – Please prompt me with one noun and one verb.  Please greet me with one noun.  If you really have to add all that detail, put it into a second clause or sentence after the greeting…and you might realize that it’s expendable.  Don’t welcome me to “the state welfare agency support line office locator”, where five other nouns modify the truly important nouns: “office locator”.  (Truly important: what can this system do for me as the caller?)  It evidently belongs to the “state welfare agency”.  It’s probably a “support line” of some sort, by inference, since I’m calling it.

“Momentarily” and “shortly” – um, don’t you mean “soon”?  The word “momentarily” really means “only for a [fleeting] moment”; will the company representative speak in a blip and be gone?  “Shortly” takes twice as long to say as “soon”.  Get the junk out of there, and not a moment too soon.  Everybody knows that the agent will probably not be with them imminently, whether the system is trying to reassure them in that direction or not.

“Your call is important to us, so please stay on the line.” – What, you pulled me off the easily ignorable hold music just to tell me that you still don’t have a capable person available to pick up my call?  I put the phone back to my ear on hearing a voice, only to be told that I’m really still on hold for the indefinite future?  And that the company would rather have me wait forever on my own time/initiative than to bother any of their people?  If my call is important, if my time as your customer is in any way valuable, how about at least offering me a chance to leave a message now so the company can call me back on their time?

“For information on blah blah blah, press 1.” I press 1, and then it says, “For information on blah blah blah, please call:” and then a different company name and their phone number! – Now, why did the first prompt lead me to believe I’d find information here on this call? Please don’t make it the customer’s problem when merged companies can’t get their own acts together into a well-organized presentation.

“Eastern Standard Time”, as in: “Our business hours are 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., Eastern Standard Time” – this almost sounds OK…but it’s wrong for half the year.  Are you going to change your automated system every six months so it correctly says “Eastern Daylight Saving Time” when appropriate?  How about just saying “Eastern Time”, leaving it that way all the time, and being done?

“Seven days a week” – strike that.  “Every day.”

“If you know your party’s extension, enter it now.” – I was invited to an extended party?  Cool!  Didn’t party lines on the phone go out sometime in the mid-1970s?  Why is this mock formal operator-ese, “your party”, still with us?  I’m calling the company to contact either a person or a department (or division).  How about: “If you know the phone extension of the person you’re calling, enter it now.”

“Visit us on the web at w-w-w, blah-blah-blah-blah” before the caller gets to make any choice. – No.  Please, no.  I called your company on the phone because your web site already didn’t give me what I needed.  I got your phone number from the web site, and I’m calling to follow up with a person or department on something I specifically need.  An automated phone call shouldn’t beg me to hang up right now and go away, even if that’s what (judging by behavior) the company really does want.  Furthermore, I’m not going to have a pen and paper handy to jot down your web address anyway, so why are you wasting my time with it?

“Please press” with every number, where the repeated “please” gets annoying. — It’s false politeness. We’re already dealing with a machine instead of a human. The “please” just sounds formulaic instead of sincere.  Please please please PLEEZZE PLEEEEEZZZZE condescend to push my buttons, saith the computer.

“Sorry, I didn’t get that.” – There is a separate essay about this stinker.  In summary: a computer is never sorry, and computers actually have less empathy (and inspire less empathy) than road kill does.  I don’t want to hear a computer apologize about its own inadequacies to serve me; I just want to be served through simple and direct questions about my needs, so I can follow the instructions and be done.

“For all other questions, including fruit bats and breakfast cereals, press 5.” – Look, doesn’t “all other questions” already catch everything I could possibly be calling about?  Why do the fruit bats and breakfast cereals need to be mentioned?  If they’re that important, shouldn’t they be their own options, and make the catch-all category be 6 or 7?  A pretty good rule of thumb is: a prompted option should probably never have the word “including” in it.  Even if you’re going to send options 5, 6, and 7 all to the same agent who handles “general” stuff, perhaps you could at least log or whisper the choice separately…and give less frustration to the caller hearing the menu, too.  “All other” means all other.

“For general information, press 1.  For information about dingo’s kidneys, press 2….” – Why is my “general” option in front of the list of specific options?   I don’t feel like listening all the way through the menu, to decide if I should have pressed 1 a long time ago.

“We are currently assisting other customers. Your call will be answered in the order in which it was received.” – If it has to say anything there, how about: “Please hold on, and someone will speak with you as soon as possible. Our people are still helping other earlier callers.” ?

“For more information, call 847-273-7502 during regular business hours.  Thank you.” – Impossible.  I have no warning that a phone number is going to be blurted in my general direction, no opportunity to write it down (even if I wanted to), and no information on their regular business hours…whoever it is.

There are easy ways around all of these problems.  Just think each of them through from the perspective of a caller who knows nothing about your company.

More to come.  See also a very long list of ideas….

According to a report recently published by BT and Nortel:

• 71 percent of U.S. and U.K. consumers would be happy to receive a call that used voice recognition to inform them that their plane, train or bus would be late.

• 80 percent reported that they would look favorably on automated calls that informed them of the time of delivery of goods to their homes.

• 69 percent of Americans and 66 percent of Britons would prefer that companies use advanced voice recognition in order to reduce their costs.

• 56 percent of U.S. respondents and 53 percent of U.K. respondents were happy to check timetables using voice recognition, but only 23 percent and 16 percent respectively welcomed the interface as a means of purchasing tickets.

I think it was cleaver that they asked consumers if they would use an automated system in order to reduce their costs. I doubt many consumers consider the massive cost of employing call center agents and that those costs will almost always be passed on to them. When presented at that angle, it doesn’t surprise me the numbers reached nearly 70 percent.

Introducing more well-designed speech-enabled IVR applications to the market and making it easier for small and medium enterprises to create those applications will surely lead to an overall increase in these numbers.

In the current issue of a bridge magazine, the ACBL Bulletin (of all places!), there is an article about badly-designed phone automation.

In her attempt to find an out-of-print book about the game, the caller tries to find the phone number of a bookstore.  The automated system gives her piles of conversational garbage and failed lookups…and then it still gives her the wrong phone number.

An excerpt:

“What city and state?”  “Fort Worth, Texas.”

“That’s Fort Worth, Texas, right?”  “Yes.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t get that.  That’s Fort Worth, Texas, right?”  “Yes.”

“Okay, do you want residential or business?”  “Business.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t….”  “BUSINESS.”

“Okay.  Please say the listing you want.”  “Half Price Books.”

“That’s Pentecostal Water of Life, right?”  ??????????? “No, it’s Half Price Books.”

“Please say the listing you want.”  “Okay.  HALF.  PRICE.  BOOKS.”

“What street?  It’s okay to say, ‘I don’t know.’”  “Hulen.”

“Okay.  You don’t know the street.”  (*#&@(*%&@#(*%&@#(*%&

“I’m sorry.  I didn’t get that.  What street again?”  “Hulen.”

“I think you said Cypress.  Is that correct?”  “Yes, Cypress.  That’s it.  Definitely Cypress.”

“I’m sorry.  I didn’t get that.  What street again?”  “I guess you DIDN’T get that, Miss Auto May Shun.  Hulen, but somehow it’s beginning to matter less and less.  I mean, half an hour ago I cared.  But it doesn’t seem important anymore, Hulen.  After all, the book I want is years old.  Bridge changes daily.  The basics, Hulen, might not be relevant in today’s hodgepodge of conventions and intricate twists and turns.  Clever insights are possibly being adopted as we speak, if you can call this speaking.  Hulen.”

“Okay, Hulen.  Is that right?”  “Yes.  Yes.  It is!  YES!”

“Okay, the number is 817-335-3902″.  (And the number was wrong; the author comments further….)

Let’s analyze that a bit.

The fundamental problem here is with the re-prompting strategy.  The computer apologizes “I’m sorry, I didn’t get that…” and the caller gets quickly agitated.  The agitation is not the caller’s fault.  It’s bad design.  The time wasted in the six words “I’m sorry, I didn’t get that”, along with the pretense of compassion, is enough to put a reasonable caller over the cliff on the second occurrence (or earlier!).

The system designer probably intended that the computer sound both deferential and polite, with such a phrase…but it’s counter-productive.  If every unparseable utterance leads to the computer acting sorry, the conversation falls apart.

When the computer tries to be too conversational, the caller (perceiving the thing as sort-of-human and using human speech/conversational patterns) volunteers extra words or sounds that a human would ignore.  The computer can’t ignore those extra sounds.  The human’s utterance is “out of grammar”…and the computer is “sorry” that it couldn’t figure it out.

And then, it immediately spirals into a feedback loop where the computer apologizes.   (But, IT’S NOT HUMAN!!!!!  IT’S NEVER SORRY!!!!!!!!!!  Cats don’t act sorry.  Why should computers?)   The human interrupts again with even more out-of-grammar speech (which is nonsense to the computer), and the conversation is dead.  The task never gets done accurately or efficiently in such situations.  All because the computer pretended to use, and to understand, human speech patterns.

The computer comes across as a bad human who is less capable of intelligent interaction than a one-year-old child.  Consequently, the caller gets understandably upset and then abusive.

And, in popular culture, automation ITSELF turns into the public enemy.  (“You *#$(%*& computer, why couldn’t you *&*#*&% hear me the first *#$*%& time?!?!?!?!?!?!??!?!  No!  Stop!  Stop  *&$*%&#%$ apologizing and shut the *&*%#$% up and listen to me!  No nono no nonono!  Stop!  I called YOU for *&*&#% HELP, because I need HELP, not a run-around…..”)

This bridge magazine article gives a great example.  The computer makes its wrong guesses at the caller’s request, tries to confirm things that are absolutely ludicrous (from the caller’s intelligent point of view), wastes its own speaking turns dwelling on the past, and that’s it. The conversation is dead.

There is one point in the conversation where this caller says something completely sarcastic, and the computer doesn’t get that either.  The computer is not programmed to interpret as “No” the utterance (with its desperately disparaging and sarcastic tone): “Yes, Cypress.  That’s it.  Definitely Cypress.”

It’s not the caller’s fault her emotions got riled up, to that destructive point.  It’s the system’s fault: for encouraging uncooperative behavior by the caller.  The system didn’t keep the necessary control of the conversation.  It would rather be sorry than accurate or efficient, apparently.

And the caller’s perspective is: Couldn’t the company afford to hire an intelligent person to answer the *&*#&%#% phone?  The company would rather waste the customer’s time instead of their own?  The company evidently cares most about keeping their own customers OFF the phone, either by providing a pointless and time-wasting run-around, or by begging the caller actively to go use the web?  That’s the perception.  That’s what bad service says to the customer.  The company would rather stick a clueless and unhelpful computer onto the line than pay an intelligent operator; too bad for the customers.  The company is too busy, or too self-centered, to help real people.

Remember Lily Tomlin’s character of the telephone operator Ernestine (“one ringy dingy, two ringy dingys”; “Is this the party to whom I am speaking?”)?

Ernestine sketch #1

Ernestine sketch #2

Ernestine was snotty, belligerent, self-centered, and presumptuous…but she was still easier to deal with than badly-done automation is.

In automated systems, everything must be done to keep the callers calm and focused on task.  The computer is never sorry.  The computer is never able to filter out extra noise or syllables as well as a toddler does.

More to the point: the confirmation/re-prompting strategy must keep the human saying easily understandable things (or pressing a small selection of buttons!), and volunteering NO extra sounds.

As soon as callers feel badly served, or not listened to, they’ll stop cooperating.  That’s human nature.  The computer doesn’t really care if the caller cooperates or not; it’s just cluelessly following its instructions.

The computer is not sorry.  An unparseable utterance, or even just a bunch of random noise or a digital phone dropout, happened in the “conversation”…and the computer couldn’t act on it.  Fine.  Time moves forward.  “The water is under the bridge.”  The computer must not apologize for being an inadequate conversational partner.  The computer must not speculate on the reason for the error, or blame anyone.  The past is the past.  The error is in the past.

The way out is very easy.  Errors will happen.  The way out is very easy.  The way out is very easy.

Initial statement of the question: “Fort Worth, Texas.  Is that right?”  “wekflkowhfpohf”   (error #1)

“Fort Worth, Texas.  Yes or No?”  “wejljlkwfhHJLhwekfhelsdkFJs”  (error #2, still didn’t get the Yes/No, or “Right”, or synonyms)

“Fort Worth, Texas.  Yes or No?”  “lwjelkfjh”  (error #3: give the caller a way around the side:)

“If that’s the city you want, press 1.  Otherwise, press 9.” 

Whether the error was an unrecognizable utterance or a timeout, the first two re-prompts are simply to say the question again as succinctly and directly as possible.  The third re-prompt gives the caller some unequivocal instructions NOT to speak the answer; for whatever reason, speaking wasn’t working.

The conversation is dead unless the caller can get past this point successfully.  The computer must therefore encourage the caller to cooperate in any way it will be able to understand.  Move forward and try to get a useful answer.  The past is gone.  Steer the future.

Longer junk such as “I’m sorry, I didn’t get that” encourages the caller to jump in with an interruption, miss the instructions again, editorialize, or worse.  It also encourages the caller to try to figure out and (speculatively) fix the CAUSE of the miscommunication, which is a pointless waste of time.  That utterance, whatever it was, is over and gone forever.  Try a new one.  (It also doesn’t work to say ONLY “I’m sorry, I didn’t get that” and not continue to the question; sometimes the error was caused by noise or by a caller interruption, cutting off part of the initial question, and now the context is lost.  The computer didn’t get WHAT?  I didn’t say anything.  Why did the question cut off?  What was the question?  What am I supposed to do now?  Did I kill it?)

Incidentally, this simple re-prompting strategy works well with small children, too.  Just restate the question in a calm and measured manner, making it clear that an answer is required.

“Do you want a banana, an apple, or a cookie?”  “Blah blah blah indecision indecision blah blah.”

“Banana, apple, or cookie?”  “lhklehfawefkjlawj”

“Banana, apple, or cookie?”  “Ummm…cookie!”

Ding!