So, your company wants to “upsell” some new product or service, and your marketing department wants to add an advertisement into the system that answers your phone.

The following example demonstrates some strategies for designing a “Caller First” experience that will delight your callers, while still slipping the marketing message into the flow if it is absolutely required.

Suppose the marketing department has drafted the following advertisement to be played as the greeting to all your callers:

“Welcome to our company.
If you or someone you know is thinking about quitting drinking, you should know our office is hosting a free, hour-long workshop that can show you a fresh approach to quitting.
It’s led by a quit drinking expert.
Plus you’ll meet an ex-drinker who quit with the help of a doctor-recommended treatment option and support.
We’d love to save you a seat, so be sure to ask the receptionist, or go to www.blahblah.com.
You might be asking yourself, “What’s going to be different about quitting this time?”
Well, for starters, several things.
No finger-pointing. No scary statistics. Just honest information…and it’s free.
You’ll even get your very own take-home materials to help jump-start your quit.
Others like you have found these workshops to be useful.
All you have to do is ask our office receptionist, or go to www.blahblah.com, and you’ll be taking an important first step toward planning your quit.”

Ummmm…woof!  If I’m the caller there, I’ve already hung up at “You might be asking yourself”, because “I’m asking myself” why I phoned this company that evidently doesn’t care about wasting my time. I’ll take my business elsewhere, if I can.

Reading that monologue aloud, it’s a 60-second message.  It’s repetitive and patronizing. The callers are already captive on the phone for a full minute before they get to say or do anything!  Do the callers really want to hear all of it?  Will they be paying attention to such a thing?  Do they listen to radio or TV ads, either, or just numb their minds until it’s over?  Is the phone really the right place for such a 60-second advertisement?

What about your callers who don’t want to hear any of it, because they were calling about something else, not about any interest in a quit-drinking workshop?  Should they have to listen to the whole thing, or any of it?

Let’s see what we can do about that. Rewrite it to be good IVR. This isn’t the radio, and we don’t have 60 seconds to burn.  Make every word matter!

“If you or someone you know is thinking about quitting drinking, you should know….”  First, “If you or someone you know is” sounds clunky, and some callers might think it’s grammatically incorrect. (Should it be “is” or “are”?)  Why go there?

“Thinking about quitting drinking”: that’s three “-ing” words jammed together.  Furthermore, the word “quit” comes up at least five or six more times in the message, and reasonably patient callers might get weary of hearing it.  Maybe they’ll quit this phone call.

“You should know our office is hosting…” Is “you should know” really the right way to lead this, when the meaning is actually “we want you to know that…”?  It’s generally not a good idea to tell people what they “should” know.

“It’s led by a quit drinking expert.”  All decent workshops are led by experts in their topic, supposedly, so why is there any need to say this?

Step back. We’re really trying to convey the information:

1. Somebody reasonably qualified
2. is leading a free workshop
3. that lasts for one hour, and
4. the workshop is about quitting the habit of drinking.

So, let’s blow away all the other hype, and convey that information directly and respectfully. “Perhaps you know someone who would like to quit drinking. Our office is hosting a free one-hour workshop about quitting that habit.”

The next information to convey is that some successful quitter will speak about the way a prescription treatment program helped him.  How about this, keeping each sentence short enough that the listener will be able to make sense of all the concepts?  “Part of the presentation is by an ex-drinker who successfully quit. He had the help of a prescription treatment and its support resources.”

The workshop is supposedly worthwhile, and its next big draw is that the participants get to take home printed materials that will help them quit drinking.  However, the drafted sentence sounds merely patronizing: “You’ll even get your very own take-home materials to help jump-start your quit.”  My very own? So I can “jump-start” myself into quitting?  Why not just tell me: “Our workshop will also have take-home materials to guide participants through the recommended process.” (That could still be improved further, perhaps, but let’s move on….)

How does the caller sign up?  By asking about it, or visiting a web site.  Let’s say so, directly: “To learn more about enrolling in this free workshop, ask our receptionist, or visit www.blahblah.com.”

Let’s put it all back together and time it, reading it aloud:

“Welcome to our company.
Perhaps you know someone who would like to quit drinking.
Our office is hosting a free one-hour workshop about quitting that habit.
Part of the presentation is by an ex-drinker who successfully quit.
He had the help of a prescription treatment and its support resources.
Our workshop will also have take-home materials to guide participants through the recommended process.
To learn more about enrolling in this free workshop, ask our receptionist, or visit www.blahblah.com.
(2 second pause so the caller can mentally process what was just said)
Now, I am transferring you to the receptionist.”

We are now down to 30 seconds instead of 60, and we have (hopefully!) conveyed all the important information in a well-organized manner.  The first sentence tells the caller to keep paying attention if there is any interest in quitting drinking.  That’s some improvement.

Still, what happens to the callers who really don’t care? Do we want to waste 30 seconds of their lives as they wait impatiently to get to the reason they called?

Let’s put in a keystroke control.  Play the full advertisement to only the callers who have some interest in attending the workshop: the callers who press 1 to hear all the details after a short teaser.  Nobody else needs to hear about the web site or the workshop’s syllabus, do they?

“Welcome to our company.
Perhaps you know someone who would like to quit drinking.
Our office is hosting a free one-hour workshop about quitting that habit.
If you want to hear more about that free workshop, press 1.
(pause 2 seconds: for the caller to press 1 or do nothing)
Here’s the receptionist.”

We are down to 14 seconds!  For the callers who do press 1, we can make a new voice page that plays “Part of the presentation is by an ex-drinker”, etc etc through the end, and give it an option to repeat those details.  That will give the callers who care about the workshop an opportunity to write down some notes about the things they are hearing.

We can still do better than that. Let’s make the assumption that we should play the advertisement only the first time someone calls; if they’re calling back a second or third time, and didn’t press 1 to hear the details that first time, don’t waste the caller’s time playing any of the advertisement again!  Just go straight to the receptionist, or to a menu about other things!  We can be smarter than an answering machine.

How is that programmed?  Very easily!  This is less than 30 minutes of work in Angel.com’s Site Builder:

• Write a row to a local data file at each call, saving the CallerID and a variable that saves a Y if 1 was pressed, or N if not (i.e. the caller wants to hear the advertisement, Y or N?).
• Set that data file to purge itself of all rows older than 1 day, purging at some low traffic time such as 4:00am. It should only have rows for people who already called today.
• On answering the call, check that data file for a match of the CallerID value and N (i.e. we already know that this particular caller doesn’t want to hear the ad).
• If such a row exists, skip the voice page that plays the ad, and go directly to whatever the caller should hear next!

So: our caller who’s back for a second or third call in the day simply hears as greeting:  “Welcome to our company. Here’s the receptionist.” Delight!  Bliss! No sitting through an unwanted advertisement twice!  No sitting through the whole thing even once, but only the first few sentences of it!

Caller First. Do you want your callers to be a captive and squirming audience, annoyed by monologues every time they call, and already fuming before they get to talk to the receptionist?  Or, do you want them to get the information they truly need to know, quickly and respectfully?

You’ve purchased an IVR system that is much more resourceful than a 1980s answering machine.  Live it up!  Design it well, with an emphasis always on the caller’s point of view!

Take-home materials:

• Shorter sentences rule.  No sentence may have 20 words or more.
• Keep the prose simple and direct.  Get rid of any grammatical constructions that a 3rd grader couldn’t write.
• This isn’t the radio.  Let your callers do something interactive as early in the call as possible.  No monologuing!
• Create some delight: allow callers to bypass things they don’t care about.
• Create even more delight: remember what each caller did or chose, the previous time that they called.  Use that knowledge to streamline the experience to their interests.
• Someone who phones your company repeatedly doesn’t have the same needs as someone new.
• The first draft is never the best, especially when designing IVR recordings.

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!

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….

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!

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….

E source, a research firm that reports on retail energy markets, reviewed the IVR systems of 100 Electric and Gas companies in North America. The report found that though there was a significant range in the quality of the IVR system reviewed, “utility customers consistently report lower levels of satisfaction when they use an IVR compared to talking directly with a phone agent, dealing in person with an agent, or even interacting with their utility at the utility web site”.

Coming across that report brought back memories of an incident I had with my electric company’s IVR system.

A few years back, my electric went out. It was at night so the house was completely dark. My wife was out of town and I was at home with our 2-year-old. So, I grabbed a flashlight, dug through the file cabinet to find the electric bill and called the outage number on the bill. An IVR picked up. No problem, I thought. I’m an IVR expert, I’ve even built the things… boy was I in for it.

The system attempted to look up my account based on my caller ID but some other name was returned so I pressed ‘2’ for ‘no’ and the system asked me for my account number. I had my bill, no problem. I had a flashlight in one hand, the phone in the other and a 2-year-old hanging on my leg. I began to punch the account number with my flash light hand, reading off the bill on the kitchen counter. The account number was long. In between trying to read the account number off the bill and punching in the digits, the system was timing out. It would ask me to enter the account number again… I’d get to 10 digits and it would time out. The time out length between inputs must have been set to 3 seconds, if that. Then, of course, after 3 timeouts, the system would hang up and I had to go through the initial VUI again. Because there was no option to connect to an operator, I eventually had to memorize the account number so I could punch it in before the system could timeout on me.

This mess may have been avoided if the designer defined a few use scenarios before the system was designed. In this case, an example of a use scenario would be, “User accesses system during a power outage at night”, so in other words, it could be dark!

This information could have led the designer to set the timeout setting to a longer stretch of time. It may have also helped them realize that it’s not always convenient for the caller to dig up their account number in the dark and as a result, designed the system to give the caller easier options to ID themselves, like social security number, alternate phone number, or even better, a name and address capture feature. It may have also clued them into offering speech recognition as an option in case the callers hands were full with the phone receiver and a flashlight. But, of course, the screaming 2-year-old could throw a no-match speech error.

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.

Check out this blog post from one of our partners, Clicktools, a provider of on-demand web based tools to build, deploy and analyze surveys. They have built an integration with Angel.com that hooks up Voice Sites with their sophisticated reporting system. In a nutshell, with Clicktools, you now can deploy surveys that capture responses both over the web and over the phone and present the results from the same Clicktools reporting and analysis interface.

Here is how you can test drive the integration.

1. Click www.clicktools.com/dashboard and login to the demo Clicktools account with the email angelivr@clicktools.com and the password ‘angelivr’
2. Call 866-248-8135 and answer the short four question survey by saying the numbers or pressing digits on your phone. Leave a comment too.
3. In Clicktools, Click the ‘+’ then ‘Results’ link in Clicktools to see your result appear before your eyes. This includes storing a link to the comment which you can cut and paste in to another browser window to hear.

As Andrew put it in the post: “You gotta LOVE on demand software!”

Indeed!

I’m happy to announce the publication of the Angel.com Outbound API documentation.

This is the brainchild of Product Management Associate Amit Agarwal, who came up with what I believe is a better approach overall that we hope to replicate for other developer documentation.

First, it’s available in several formats (Web, PDF). Second, it comes with reference sample client implementations that you can download and run on your computer, for the following languages: Java, PHP, Perl, Ruby, JSP and C#. Third, it has been tested and re-tested for accuracy.

Most importantly, though, it is a living document. It is part of The IVR Wiki. This is an initiative we’ll be talking about more in the upcoming days. In a nutshell, though, wikis are websites that anybody can edit. That means you. So, if any of the hundreds of smart developers who use the platform want to improve the documentation, or share their own documentation, it will be easy to do with the wiki.

Technorati Tags: angel.com, ivr, outbound, outbound ivr, ivrrwiki, webservices, wiki

Alphanumeric strings are everywhere — Canadian postal codes, employee ID’s, license plate numbers — yet speech recognition is notorious for not being able to capture alphanumeric utterances from callers because of the phonetic similarity of many letters, such as d, t, and z. As Walter Rolandi points out his article The Alpha Bail, one solution is the use of the NATO Phonetic Alphabet (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, etc.). While this approach can improve recognition accuracy, it tends to make the VUI take on a “militaristic persona”. As a caller, I think I would feel like I’d been suddenly thrown into a scene from a WWII movie — “Alpha Bravo Charlie, roger that!”

An approach that we’ve taken with several customers is the B&B (Brown & Bouzid) Algorithm, a two-step solution where the caller first enters the a/n string via touch-tone, and then speaks it one digit at a time. So the VUI ends up sounding something like (more…)