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

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.

Those among you, like myself, who have been in the speech and IVR industry for more years than we care to say, who have all along believed (and still believe) that the speech wave is “just around the corner,” but who continue to be frustrated by the wide gap between the promise of speech automation and its actual state in practice, can only be heartened by this story.

For us at angel.com, the story is especially gratifying for two reasons: first, because its protagonists are new additions to the angel.com family, but also because their initiative represents precisely the type of creative use of speech automation technology we want to see entrepreneurs out there make in solving very concrete business problems.

Read about how Vishal Chordia, Amit Agarwal, and Lawrence Lee (seen above in that order, from left to right), recent graduates from Carnegie Mellon University, worked on and deployed a fully-automated bus schedule operator that tells callers, in real time and to the minute, expected bus arrivals for given stops.

Try out the solution at: 1-866-MY-CMU-BUS.

Here are links to the two articles published (so far) on their exploits: “Tracking through talking: Carnegie Mellon alums create way to track buses by phone” and “Alumni Create Phone System for Campus Bus Routes”.

How was the application received? Well, take a listen to what a satisfied customer had to say!

Kudos guys!

This was the question that Charlotte County public schools in Florida recently posed to 20,000 families using Angel.com’s Outbound IVR service. In this personalized outbound campaign, kicked off by uploading a spreadsheet of phone number to the Angel.com Outbound Campaign Manager, the message delivered to families was “On a scale from 1 to 9, would you recommend your high school, [appropriate high school name dynamically entered here], to a new family moving to the area?” The message was tailored to the recipient, and the survey was just this one simple, yet insightful, question to which 38% of the recipients responded (most positively!).

A couple of lessons from this application are (1) outbound IVR is a great way for educational institutions (or any enterprise) to get feedback from stakeholders, and (2) you can get very good insight from a single, simple question. Would I recommend my High School? Absolutely.

For a good measure of fun, check out this Outbound IVR application: – Snakes on a Plane

After picking a few options, the flash application will offer you the option of getting a message by phone or by email. The phone version is quite more engaging, and your friends will laugh out loud with Samuel L Jackson’s voice interface.

To me, this kind of app is a great example of two interesting trends:

• The use of automated voice interactivity as a new marketing medium
• The power of data-driven interaction. Letting the application know a few facts about the recipient of the call creates a stunning personalization effect.

Technorati Tags: click to call, clicktocall, outbound, outbound ivr, entertainment, snakes on a plane, snakesonaplane

Jason Freeman, a professor of Music at Georgia Tech, has published a fun work of interactive media art, know as Shakespeare Cuisinart.

You call a number, recite some Shakespeare, and in return, you get a music composition.

In his website, he explains:

The caller’s voice is not subjected to any digital signal processing; it is only spliced and layered in a manner similar to classic musique concrete of the 1950s.

You be the judge.

Technorati Tags: angel.com, ivr, fun, jasonfreeman

I’m working on a little kitchen renovation project, you know, the kind where you swap a 25 year old microwave oven for a shiny new one. So I bought some appliances at Sears. And, as luck would have it, when they were delivered, Sears sent me two dishwashers and no cooktop.

I had to call. I got the number, the one on the shipping manifest. I got Sears Delivery. Did you know it’s a different company than Sears? They said, “call the store”. “The store? I bought them online?” “Oh, then call the online store.”.

And so, a bunch of phone calls ensued. To different numbers. Each one with its “Thank you for calling Sears. For xxx, press 1.”, each one with its queue. Each one with an agent unable to see what else had been going on.

There has to be a better way. And there is.

Have the discipline to publish one number only. Same number for sales, order status, product information, delivery and returns.

This will force some thinking about how to properly route the call. Speech recognition can do a lot. If you combine it with a data-driven approach, then more.

Here are some reasons why you’re better off with one number:

• All your customer’s calls will be to the right number.
• It will be easier to share information captured by the speech system between departments
• You can use data logged about prior calls to determine how to handle the current call. (”I see you had a delivery earlier today. Was everything OK?”)

Would you have multiple websites to serve your customers? (sears.com, searsorderstatus.com, searsdelivery.com, searsproductreturns.com…) Then why do it with phones?

Technorati Tags: angel.com, customerservice, sears, speech recognition, speechrec