No matter how carefully you crafted your VUI design, or how diligently the design was implemented, or how thoroughly the implementation was tested, your application will need regular and careful tuning once deployed if your aim is to maintain a world-class, highly usable voice solution.

Tune up

To effectively tune your application, you should have at your disposal three sources of information: (1) Call Logs: which will enable you to identify patterns across calls (e.g., where are people hanging up), (2) Call Recordings: which will enable you to understand the nature of a problem (why are people hanging up?), and (3) Your callers: usually, you do this by assessing their level of satisfaction with the solution.

Here are the basic questions that need to be asked in order to begin tuning a voice application:

Where are people hanging up? A hang up prior to completion of a task is usually a sign of frustration. If the goal of your application is automation, your first tuning task is to identify such hang up spots in your application and understand why people are hanging up.

Where are people asking to be routed to an agent? If you have designed your application with the goal of empowering the caller, you must have provided the caller with the option to route to an agent. A caller actively asking to speak to an agent is a caller who has decided that the application is not successfully enabling them to serve themselves. This is especially true of callers who have engaged the application over several minutes of interaction and then decided to bail out.

Where are people saying the wrong thing? The aim here is to identify those spots in your application where no-match failures are significantly higher than the average or the expected. The remedy is to listen to the prompt the caller hears and then listen what people are saying in response to that prompt. In such situations, adjust your application by either re-writing the prompt or by adding to the language the system is listening to what callers are responding with.

Where are people not saying anything? These are the spots in your application where the caller goes quiet on you. This occurs usually because the prompt is confusing or the caller was asked for some information that they don’t have (or don’t have ready access to, such as a subscription ID or an account number). If the issue is with lack of clarity of ambiguity, then re-craft your prompt (see Chapter 3). If the issue is with lack of readiness, then provide the caller with the time they need to retrieve the information you need from them or suggest that they call back when they have the information handy. Another strategy is to inform the caller at the very outset of the interaction that the subscription ID or the account number will be needed.

Where are people speaking too soon? At times, callers are impatient and speak sooner than they should, often missing crucial information or instructions. To remedy, either turn the barge-in setting off, or re-craft the wording of the prompt the caller is interrupting.

What type of noise level are your callers calling from? When you listen to your recordings, pay attention to the noise level and how the noise is affecting the no-match error rates.

What options are people asking for? If you discover that 80% of your callers are checking their savings balance, then ask 100% of your callers if they are calling about checking their Savings balance. By definition, 80% of the time your will be right.

How are people feeling about the application? You can probably get a good sense of how people feel about the application by just listening to the tone of their voice in your call recordings.

We’ve all heard of Web cookies. They’re very common, have been around for years now, and can be used to achieve many results.  One in particular being personalization - remembering user preferences in anything from shopping carts to news and weather sites. They can even be used to push advertising to a user based on browsing activity.

Much like web cookies are used in websites, Caller ID can be used in IVR to achieve similar results. Again, personalization - offering custom menu options, anticipating why a caller is calling based on selections in previous calls, routing based on the area code, etc. This behavior in Web applications is very common, nearly ubiquitous. But why is it so uncommon in voice applications? Are most IVR designers living in the dark ages? Do they have limited imaginations? Are there too many barriers to adding personalization and their budgets make it prohibitive?

Perhaps the first 2 can’t be helped but the 3rd can. Enter Angel.com. We’ve always had the capability to add personalization to a voice application, using Caller ID as the ‘cookie’, all without any programming necessary. It all comes out of the box using standard Angel Voice Pages. Of course, if you wanted use your CRM data to personalize the caller experience, again, based on Caller ID or any other identifier, we make that pretty simple as well. This is why it’s so easy for us to stand behind our mantra of ‘putting the caller first’ - because we make it exceptionally easy to do so.

A quick note to alert you about Voice Secure, our latest partnership integration, this one with Voice Verified.

Below is a blurb from our solution landing page:

Angel.com combines award winning IVR and call center technologies with voice authentication solutions to provide a way for callers to quickly, conveniently and securely access personal information over the phone. By simply repeating a few random digits in the IVR, caller identity is automatically verified through the composition of their voice.

Voice Secure Datasheet (PDF 97kb)

• Secure – No more revealing private information over the phone, risking having your personal information fall into the wrong hands.
• Convenient – No more forgotten passwords or PINs.
• Saves Time – No more time consuming process of routing calls to agents for verification of identity or password resets.

Bank account balances. Medical test results. Order status. Customers call your IVR for many reasons, but what they all have in common is they want their information quickly and they want it to be secure. Current security measures include passwords, PINs, challenge questions or personal information to confirm identity, creating a lengthy process for a caller to get the information they need over the phone. Not to mention the burden this places on your call center agents simply to identify the caller.

With simple and accurate voice verification through your Angel.com IVR or call center solution, your callers and agents are immediately able to focus on call resolution rather than identity confirmation.

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!

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….

We recently released a new IVR / CRM White Paper entitled, “5 Ways To Put Your CRM Data to Work for You and Your Customers”. 

Here’s a brief abstract:

Organizations that leverage IVR applications with their customer service functions understand that one key to generating a positive caller experience is providing self-service options, or providing callers with fast and efficient phone-based interactions to automatically deliver real-time information at their convenience. Simply put: the best way to serve your customers is to have the information they need, when they need it.

Information from your CRM system can also be used in an automated fashion to provide the caller with personalized information at the start of the call. IVR systems can be set to read data such as whether the caller is a VIP customer or may have recently ordered one of your products, upfront and respond accordingly. By doing this you accomplish increased customer satisfaction in two ways: 1) VIP customers can be addressed as such, sent into a special queue with more succinct IVR options and shorter on hold times, making them feel that they are appreciated as customers; 2) a customer who has recently purchased your product or submitted a help desk ticket can be identified by caller ID, and given the information they are likely looking for – such as order or ticket status – immediately without having to wait on hold to speak with an agent.

In essence, integrating your CRM system — such as salesforce.com, NetSuite, SugarCRM, Oracle, etc. — with your IVR and phone system allows you to address sales, marketing and support problems such as:

• Giving hands-free, voice-enabled access to your CRM database to sales reps so they can get information from the database and update information through a simple phone call, without the need for a computer or internet connection.
• Providing personalized self-service options to your customers, allowing you to decrease costs by minimizing agent usage on routine support calls such as case/order status.
• Automatically capturing all phone leads to increase your total number of sales and marketing prospects by populating caller data directly into your CRM application.
• Capturing and reporting on satisfaction levels of your customers to gain increased insight into satisfaction at the customer level in your CRM over time.
• Recording and analyzing all phone calls made and received by sales reps or agents to perform quality control on under performing agents and training for new reps.

One important point to understand… this is NOT Blackberry or smart phone access to CRM data.  This is hands-free, fast access to data through a phone call.  Figure this — through a (non-scientific) experiment, I calculated the time it takes to update a record in my CRM database through 3 different methods, as if I were a sales rep on the road who just completed a meeting and wanted to update the prospect record with meeting notes.

• Laptop:  Roughly 10 minutes to start up my laptop, login to my CRM account, update a record and shut down
• Smart phone (iPhone):  Almost 9 minutes performing the same task with cellular access
• Angel.com phone call:  3.5 minutes performing the same task with a phone call through the Angel.com voice-enabled IVR system — which I could do while driving to my next appointment!

Your sales reps can access and update data on the road while driving; customers can get status updates automatically through a phone call to the system; survey data goes directly into your CRM database through a phone call. 

Download the IVR/CRM integration white paper or visit the Angel.com IVR/CRM integration web page to find out how you can get the same functionality for your company!

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A recent Washington Post article featured executives, professors, even recording artists who were so behind on reading and responding to email that they decided to declare “email bankruptcy” - delete their inboxes and make a fresh start.

There are a few measures people can take to avoid email bankruptcy. Email isn’t always the most effective means of communication. For some time now, our Product Management Team here at Angel have been using wikis, blogs, and of course, chat to minimize email between team members. Recently, we’ve been using jaiku to log quick notes about what were working on at any given time, ideas, issues we’re “stuck” on, anything really. This relatively new concept of “microblogging” has really helped our team keep up with what each other are doing. It also gives us a way to look back on a day to see where all of our time is going. As a matter of fact, after I publish this post, instead of emailing the team to alert them that I’ve put something on the blog, I’ll just log it on jaiku. It’ll show up on their jaiku page and they can choose to act upon it or not.

One of the executives mentioned in that Post article, Jeff Nolan, CEO of Teqlo, made the following statement on his blog…

“I am now calling people rather than going through the all-too-typical multiple message reply chain to resolve an issue. From here on out I am going back to voice communication as my primary mechanism for interacting with people.”

I would think a lot of folks would look down on this… voice communication as a primary means of interaction? That’s so two decades ago, right? This also begs the question, “Wouldn’t the same issues that these people had with email arise with voice communication? Well, perhaps for most, but not if you’re using the right technology.

For example, a couple of our team members have been working on integrating Angel.com with the iotum Relevance Engine. What’s so cool about this? Well, you’ll only get passed the calls that are important to you while the system discreetly handles those calls that are not as important (vendors especially).

Also, with Angel.com’s technology, you can link your voice communications to your CRM, intelligently log all of your inbound and outbound calls, have them recorded, add post-call comments, tag calls, and even have the data automatically posted to a blog. Or, if you’re willing to flirt with email bankruptcy, you could always have the data sent to your email. Okay… let’s not go there.

As you may know, the premier expo for the CRM industry, DestinationCRM, and the speech industry’s annual event, SpeechTek, are both holding their respective gatherings this year in New York City at the Marriott Marquis Hotel. DetinationCRM 2007 will take place between August 21 and 22, while SpeechTek 2007 will take place between August 20 and 23.

I’m glad to see the two conferences brought together under one roof. I’ve always been a big believer in the still mainly untapped possibilities of phone-enabling CRM — or, if you prefer, CRM-enabling the phone. Think about it: if you are a sales person, what do you do all day long? You type stuff into your CRM and you talk over the phone. What do you do if you are in support? You type stuff into your CRM and you talk over the phone. In other words, you type stuff into your CRM and talk over the phone before you close your deals, and you do the same after you close your deals!

And yet, the CRM and the telephone continue to be used as if they lived in completely different worlds. Simple stuff like logging your phone activity into your CRM, accessing your CRM data by telephone, capturing data about the interactions between your prospects and your sales people, or your clients and your support agents, etc. — pretty basic stuff — continues to elude most CRM systems.

Here at Angel.com, we have already converted the vision of phone-enabling the CRM into concrete solutions for our clients. So far, we have phone-enabled Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, and Netsuite.

So, if you use any of those three solutions for your CRM, contact us and we will take care of you.

If you are using some other CRM and would be interested in deploying an inbound or outbound IVR, or Call Center solution, contact us and we will work with you to integrate with your CRM.

If you are an integrator and are interested in working with us to integrate Angel.com with some other CRM, fill out our partner application and we can talk.

Tracking marketing spend is always an issue. Companies spend money on many different campaigns to market their product(s) and struggle to report on the ROI of these marketing campaigns. As a marketing professional at a B2B company, I face the ongoing struggle to figure out the best way of tracking the leads that come in through our marketing campaigns. The web allows us to easily get our message out, and different web campaigns come with built-in tracking. But what about the most common connection you have with your leads/prospects — the phone. How do you track different web marketing campaigns through the phone?

Sure, you can beg your sales reps to ask each caller where they heard about your company, and you can hope that the caller actually remembers where they found you — neither of these has ever worked well for me. Instead, you can do what we at Angel.com have recently taken to doing. With our IVR and Salesforce.com integration we can now get much more exact tracking of where our phone leads came from and automatically store it directly in our CRM system.

Try this… for each marketing campaign you run, put a different phone number on the marketing piece. When people dial that specific number, you’ll know which campaign they came from. The call information, including “dialed number” will be populated directly into your Salesforce.com account so you can generate reports on these calls. Click on the screenshot at right for a larger image… for each call that comes into your sales department you can get call stats such as time of call, caller ID, hold time, talk time, rep the call was routed to, and most importantly for me, dialed number.

The call with the red box around it was one that I know came from one of our marketing campaigns — I can tell by the dialed number. From here I can run reports on each of the numbers to see which one is drawing the most calls. This call, for example, gives further ROI on our web advertising campaign on Google. Before implementing this, we only knew how many people clicked and filled out a web form. Now we know how many prospects forego the web form and call a sales rep instead. I can then run the caller ID against Leads, Opportunities and Accounts in Salesforce.com.

To take this even a step farther, I can actually automatically convert these calls into actual Leads in Salesforce.com by using one of our packaged integrations called LeadByFone, which does a reverse lookup on caller ID and inputs the name and address information from that reverse lookup as a new Lead in Salesforce.com. I’ll cover that in my next post.

Using your IVR application to track marketing campaigns has a definitive effect on the ROI of those campaigns. Don’t miss out on knowing where your phone leads are coming from.