This is brilliant. We can’t take credit for it, as some competitor apparently built this client’s system, but it’s a great idea. It would be easy to build the same thing in our own software.

As it says in some wall postings on the Facebook fan page for a popular candy bar:

“Hotline rocks! Thanks for being an organization that’s not afraid to show their sense of humor! I believe you just upped your popularity even more by doing that!”

“Loooooooooooooove the hotline more companies need to have a sense of humor this way!!”

“Love the hotline! Hilarious. Thanks for the laughs.”

“1-800-295-0051 OMG LOL!!!!! ok press 1 for english or 2 for spanish, then hit 4 for “funner options” then hit 7. you will be rolling on the floor laughing!”

Exactly. Dial that number, listen through the short advertisement of their product, and the address of this Facebook fan group. Then, wait through the menu that offers 1 or 2 for the language, but do nothing. After a short pause, it gives additional options. (An “Easter egg” hidden feature that nobody expects on a boring corporate product line, and that’s why it is fun.) …For Pig Latin, esspray orway aysay eethray. For a knock-knock joke and other funner stuff, press or say 4.

Way down into that inner “funner stuff” menu, which itself was pretty funny, option 7 tells the caller about the different kinds of cooties, and how to get rid of them. Well done, and quite entertaining!

Option 5 is pretty good, too: “Hear me give a noogie to the operator next to me”, and then it sounds like the two guys clowning in a call center.

As of this morning, that Facebook group has 214,000 fans. That’s 214,000 potential customers for their product, plus all their family and friends.

And, if these fans are spreading excitement about the IVR hotline by word of mouth (and by forwarding e-mails and Facebook statuses)…WOW! That’s where I heard about it: seeing a thing on the Internet from somebody I’ve never met…advertising an IVR system as “this is so much fun, you’ve gotta call it!”

Some observations:

Once, when I called it back to hear some of the other options, it didn’t give any of the extras. There could be several possible causes for that: (1) Maybe those were temporarily taken down? (2) Maybe the system is capturing Caller ID, and deliberately not playing the extras for subsequent calls: so, a caller won’t keep calling it back all day and running up the charges. But also, it forces the caller to use a different phone, which gives another opportunity to capture another Caller ID, store it into a database, do a reverse lookup, get a mailing address, and send out some promotional materials…. Clever!

I waited a while, and tried it from a different phone. On my first three attempts in that session, the system did not answer. It gave me a busy signal. Did the company get overwhelmed by the success of this application and its viral spread of enthusiasm? Didn’t they scale it big enough when they built it? What platform are they using that can’t handle all the traffic….?  That’s a problem: being ready for overwhelming success.

Eventually, I got through again, and it let me get to all the options each time. So, maybe they aren’t blocking multiple calls by Caller ID, after all…although it would be clever, and might become necessary.

The “press or say” stuff on the options is annoying, and this doesn’t really need to be a speech recognition system. It would be just as funny and useful if it were keypad-only (DTMF). But hey, it’s their money, and if they want to create more error-handling problems for themselves with this speech design, they are welcome to it. When some kid is playing this phone call on a cell phone’s speaker to amuse a friend, and they’re laughing, the laughing and other noises shouldn’t make it cut off the prompts.

The guy introducing the Spanish option obviously isn’t a Spanish speaker. That’s a demerit. They could have done better. He’s a good actor for the funny options, though: deadpan enough to mock other bad IVR systems and their cliches, but giving just enough twist to the delivery that the caller realizes it’s funny.

All around, it’s brilliant in generating traffic to advertise their product. If they’ve considered those other problems, they’ve done a great thing here: marketing to the approximately fourth-grade level, giving it some viral hooks for free publicity, and making it “funner” than everybody else’s boring hotlines.

Again, that phone number is: 1-800-295-0051

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!

Here’s a quick hit from the CRM Buyer website… Patrick Barnard of Customer Inter@ction Solutions wrote a piece titled “SaaS: Bringing the Call Center Within a Small Company’s Reach“.  Great piece that really spells out the key benefits of going hosted for you call center.  Here’s an excerpt:

If you’re running a growing small business and you’re thinking about setting up your own in-house VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) call center to better serve your customers, gain new efficiencies and improve the bottom line, you should definitely consider the SaaS model to meet your call center software needs. The first and most important step is to determine whether the SaaS model is the right fit — for example, some SaaS solutions are better suited to out-bound call or contact centers, where as others are geared for inbound or blended service.

Patrick covers the upfront and ongoing costs comparisons, speed to market, ongoing upgrades/updates, remote access and remote agents, efficiency, scalability, control, and improved customer satisfaction (which is what all of the other benefits culminate in.

Great read, great summarization of all the key benefits of the SaaS call center model… and it saves me the time of typing them all out!  It’s nice to see someone else preaching what we at Angel.com preach every day!

It breaks my heart to see Skype toying with fate, at the edge of the abyss. With such untapped market for small business communications, and what are they working on:

Skype 3.0

# feature: Public chatrooms
# feature: Extras Manager
# feature: Sound Settings Widget

(From changelog)

And then:

the biggest threat to Skype today is not being able to develop non-telephony streams of revenue. There is excitement in eating our own revenue streams

(From an interview by Shel Israel with Sten Tamkivi)

Does this mean that the bulk of Skype development will be devoted to features such as pretty icons, funky sounding ringtones and rehashes of IRC? Wow, my productivity will be going through the roof!

This is not what Skype’s DNA is about. Skype = great voice conversations from my computer.

Doesn’t Skype grasp that it has a golden opportunity to single-handedly change, once and forever, the meaning of “phone”? At the Voice 2.0 conference we explored the paradigm change, but, are we the only ones realizing what this means?

So much talent, such puzzling direction.

People who use the phone for a living, small businesses, they’re crying out for their own Skype revolution. It’s not just about the consumer. There is such a thing as a better phone, one that understands my time, my contacts, my availability, the groups I’m part of. One that uses more than an 8khz audio channel and tones to signal. And the smart, talented people at Skype have a chance to make it happen. Before it becomes too late.

And, while Skypecasters around the world rejoice, we wait for “the Transfer API“, and “Naked Skype“, and “SkypeNET“.

Technorati Tags: angel.com, shel israel, skype, voice 2.0, voice2.0

Frost & Sullivan issued a press release today covering the current size of the US IVR market and expected growth in the industry.  The release estimates the current size of the market at $565 million, and projects the size of the market to grow to $1.49 billion by 2012.  Less than 200% growth over a 6 year period?  Seems like an awfully conservative growth estimate for a relatively young technology, but the release does offer a valuable piece of advice to IVR systems/services companies:

In order to overcome past experiences with failed deployments, vendors need to educate and assist customers in deploying optimal solutions. The primary reason for reluctance in deployment so far to deploy speech self- service solutions and for the lack of the growth of speech-enabled IVR market is its failure in the past.

Amen to that.  A large part of the responsibility for deploying effective speech/IVR solutions falls on the vendor community - if industry companies want to maximize growth potential, we need to provide educational tools for IT/business staffers to learn about the technology, the different deployment options (hosted vs. on-premise) and the various development tools. 

And if the failure of IVR solutions in the past impacts willingness to deploy future solutions as much as this release indicates, then the vendors in the IVR industry need to start focusing more on marketing - publicize customer successes, publish actual ROI results, and identify the tangible progress in the development of speech technology which allows for more effective, reliable and cost-efficient solutions.

I saw on Friday that Nuance is filing a law suit for patent infringement against TellMe Networks. Read the full Nuance press release. 

Seems like the claims are mostly related to TellMe’s 411 / Directory Assistance application - a vertical that Nuance has spent a lot of R&D dollars on in recent years, with limited commercial success at least in the US. 

I’m really torn on this one.

On the one hand, I know first hand how much work and effort go into getting critical patents awarded and can certainly relate to being as protective as possible. Especially, if you are in a competitive situation with the other party for big, big dollar deals. (more…)

I was recently invited to present at the CCDemo show in Austin in a session called “Technology for Hire - Contact Centers On-Demand”. Since the slides are pretty self-explanatory, I thought I’d just post them for downloading.

• CCDemo Presentation

Main Take-Aways

• On-premise deployments of contact center technology are painful and risky
• True On-Demand offerings like Angel.com can not only minimize the deployment risk, but can also ensure higher quality by
• Enabling Personalized, Data-Driven IVR Solutions
• Providing Next-Generation Call Analysis and Recording
• Leveraging Network effects that will create more and more value with every customer that joins Angel.com (more…)