IVR can be amazing stuff.  Especially when the idea and the design of the IVR system is put in the hands of someone who has never built an IVR application and who’s mind isn’t governed and constrained by the conventional wisdom that says what an IVR can and can’t be or can and can’t do.  Thus was the goal of ESD.051: Engineering Innovation and Design, a class at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s School of Engineering.  Taught by Blade Kotelly, an IVR industry vet and author of a book on speech-recognition interface design titled The Art and Business of Speech Recognition: Creating the Noble Voice, and MIT Professor Joel Schindall, the course was designed to teach students how to think through the process, design and build of an engineering project of any kind.  With heavy emphasis on designing and building a useful voice-based application, Angel.com donated the necessary tools to the students to accomplish their tasks.

Though the course was taught previously, there had been a reliance on the students to either know complex VXML coding or to learn VXML on the fly during the course of the semester.  This provided both a time and knowledge hurdle for those students in accomplishing their goals.  After seeing a demo of Angel.com’s on-demand WYSIWYG Site Builder toolkit, Blade knew he had something very special in IVR design tools that would lead to much greater success in his class.  And that it did.

“If Apple made an interface for designing speech applications, it would be the Angel.com Site Builder toolkit. There’s no better tool for designing voice applications,” said Blade Kotelly. ” “It’s as easy to use as my iPhone.  In fact, I had students with zero coding experience producing applications in minutes, so I had to make the homework assignments more difficult! This is truly an amazing tool that has been trans-formative with my students.”

Here is just a sampling of the unique voice applications built by MIT college students:

• The “MITchell Partymann” Facebook Party App: The students created a compelling persona named “MITchell Partymann” that Facebook users can invite to their parties.  They then created a phone application that allows users to call from any phone while they’re out around town/campus, to find out where the parties are.  Any event that MITchell Partyman is invited to is accessible through the phone app, and all of the relevant data elements about the party are pulled out of the Facebook invite page and played over the phone.
• Foursquare Voice: Allows users to interact with the location-based social networking website, Foursquare, to connect with their friends in real time. Check-in, earn badges, hear tips, keep a to-do list, find friends and even record messages for Twitter, Facebook and iPhone all through the phone.
• The “Echo” To Do List Manager: Enables users to call a phone number and set up to do lists, shopping lists, etc.  The voice app uses an integration with Vlingo to convert speech to text, then stores the lists in a SQL database.  Users are then able to check items off when complete.
• “Car Talk” Remote Control Car Application: Using web services and an Ardunio chip to talk to a controller that sends signals to an RC car, callers can speak commands through a phone (such as “turn left” and “go forward”) that direct the car.

All of these voice applications, and many more were created within a few weeks using Angel.com.  The use of Angel.com and the time saved on creating the IVR applications was invaluable, allowing students to build even more robust integrations, more detailed call flows, and to spend more time on the creative and business presentation aspects of their projects, rather than the programming.

Held as a Spring and Fall semester class within the Bernard M. Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program — a selective program for MIT undergraduate engineering students — the lab gave 45 MIT students the opportunity to design next-generation voice user interface (VUI) applications for consumers.  The class was so successful this semester through the use of Angel.com that requests for enrollment in the class for Fall semester have doubled.

“This class was such a huge success that students have joined the Gordon program because of it,” notes Kotelly.  “Students couldn’t stop talking about the IVR solutions they were building, which lead other students to get excited about the opportunity to do the same.  We will certainly be asking Angel.com for their help in supplying our students with access to Site Builder in all future classes.  We can’t wait to see how the bar is raised next semester on the types of apps they will develop.”

Good luck to the next round of students.  We can’t wait to see what you develop either!

Today Angel.com announces a break through in the IVR and Call Center world… embedded business intelligence analytics and reporting for IVR and Call Center Solutions using MicroStrategy.  Angel.com has been working for many months with the goal to not just bring stronger add-on reports to the IVR and call center world, but fully embedded business intelligence analytics built right into our on-demand Site Builder platform.  This capability came out of Beta today.

Dubbed “Caller First Analytics“, Angel.com was working to design a suite of fully customizable reports that enable businesses to deeply analyze their IVR applications with the goal of making the applications better for callers, which in turn has a positive effect on the business’ bottom line.  Participating in the Beta were Angel.com customers such as AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Barnes & Noble and Hughes Networks.  For some of these customers we’ve been able to use Caller First Analytics to address potential issues in the IVR, fix them, and incrementally increase the efficiency of the IVR to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings for the business.

“Recently the marketplace has been expressing interest in the merits of integrating business intelligence with IVR,” said Jay Lassman, Research Director at Gartner, Inc.  “This marriage offers the possibility for large enterprises to better analyze and understand customer needs as well as voice call data, which should lead to improved customer satisfaction and business growth.”

Here’s a look at some of the key features Caller First Analytics will give Angel.com customers:

• Voice User Interface Reports. Track hang-ups, visits, time spent on a page, and other indicators of trouble spots in your voice application.
• Application Performance Reports. Measure and track task completion metrics, automation and containment rates, and transferred call statistics.
• Funnel Analysis. View the path callers take through the system and identify entry and exit points, which areas are accessed most frequently, and hang up points.
• Customizable Views. Customize reports by sorting columns, removing columns and filtering data, then save the reports in a “My Reports” folder so they can be accessed later or subscribed to.
• Export and Share. Schedule reports to be delivered via email to all major stake holders, or export reports to Excel for further analysis.
• Historical Reporting. Pull reports based on call parameter to see how your call metrics change over time.

To learn more, visit the Caller First Analytics page on the Angel.com website, and view the Caller First Analytics Overview video.

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

Organizations that thrive and grow are the ones that live by the principles of high performance and put a strong focus on their mission and values, coupled with superb business execution. In any great organization, it is the people that make the difference - no organization can succeed until individuals within it succeed.  That brings me to the topic of establishing measurable goals that correlate directly to customer satisfaction. If your goals are tied directly to your end-customer’s satisfaction, by achieving your goals you achieve a higher level of customer satisfaction. In today’s call center environment, there are numerous metrics and goals created against those metrics but realistically, are they all of equal importance? One of the most fundamental principles of organizational activity is that human beings are genetically “hard-wired” to do one thing at a time with excellence, not 10 to 20 things all at once. The first discipline to singling out what is most important in your business is to focus only on your wildly important goals (WIGs), goals that put the Caller First^SM.

There’s no better place to illustrate how this notion is honored than at the airport. Right now there could be more than 100 airplanes either approaching, landing, taking off or moving around. All of the planes are very, very important to an air traffic controller – especially if you happen to be in one of them. However, if you are in the control tower and you have a plane landing in front of you, landing that plane safely is the single most important objective you have at the moment. That is not to say that the other 20 planes in the air and on the ground are not important, they are all very important and lives are always at risk, however, focus has to be put on what is wildly important at that particular moment in time. This is the premise supporting the foundations of WIGs.

So how do you determine what is wildly important in your call center? Put all focus on the customer and/or the caller. At Angel.com, we call this the Caller First^SM methodology to put the caller first with every call, enabling callers to get the information they need quickly and helping businesses of all kinds realize improved service levels and optimize business efficiency. Using this approach, call center managers should develop departmental goals that are most important to their customer or end caller. At a previous software company where I managed a global Technical Support organization for a Fortune 500 company, I ascertained that a customer’s primary concerns were the following:

• Getting through to agents that are always available and accessible – no waiting (Angel systems/staffing/workflow)
• Talking with educated, knowledgeable & helpful support reps (internal training & employee development)
• Seeing thorough & well documented support tickets, roadmaps, reports & documents (quality measures)
• Getting through to agents that are happy & proud to work there; great attitudes (motivation/recognition)
• Sure there are many others that could be included but the goal here is not to dilute the list with goals of lesser significance but to single out goals that focus on putting the Caller First^SM.

So, taking a step back, there has to be a strategy in place to execute all of this. FranklinCovey, Inc. developed The 4 Disciplines of Execution® — unleashing the power of your entire workforce by creating a high degree of alignment in your organization and focusing your people’s daily energies into delivering results that really matter to the strategic direction of your organization. Just as important as it is to get your team moving in the right direction, you have to make sure they’re all headed in the same direction. The 4 Disciplines of Execution gave me a set of tools and processes to bring my support organization into alignment with the objectives I listed above. In summary, after I created my Wildly Important Goals, my objective was to:

1. Put all of our focus on my Wildly Important Goals (display them all over the center; createawareness)
2. Act on the lead measures to make these goals happen (processes, workflows, etc.)
3. Keep a compelling scorecard (measure weekly, report/display improvement)
4. Hold agents accountable (everyone is a contributor, build these into their performanceobjectives)

Imagine the power of an entire organization that is focused — 100% of the time — on the things that drive your department, your division…your organization. It is very powerful. The 4 Disciplines of Execution are all about producing results. For me, this immediately translated into higher levels of customer satisfaction because I was focusing on the customer, the end caller. By applying the Angel.com Caller First^SM methodology as your focal point, you are showing your customers that you care about them and their success, which ultimately will translate into business success for you. This was extremely successful for me and can be for you also, just focus on what is important by always putting your callers first.

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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.

Happy Holidays

Holiday season is a perfect time to get with the family and spend maximum time together..but certain things like the weather and traffic can either delay or spoil your plans..I can totally relate to this as I commute from Gaithersburg, MD to Tysons Corner , VA, and recently the traffic has been out of control, blame it on the weather or the last minute shopper rush.

To lend a helping hand, Angel.com Creative Services has launched 2 voice mashups, which can be used to get live weather and traffic updates based on the entered zip code. Angel uses yahoo weather and traffic API to get you the real time weather and traffic updates…

For Weather updates, please call:

(888) 205-5780

For Traffic Updates, please call

(888) 205-5783

There is no cost associated with using these services…simply call in and be informed

Have a safe holiday season !!

Sameer Padha

Product Manager, Angel.com

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.

Marketers are always looking for the next best thing to set their products and services apart from the competition. Old stand-bys like web advertising, direct mail, email are great – but isn’t that what everyone is doing? What most don’t realize is the value an IVR can bring to your marketing efforts.

As an important access point to customers, the telephone represents a valuable sales channel and an important opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell products and services. Rather than focus strictly on outbound solicitation, marketers are also providing offers and incentives to customers when they call into the call center. This method is particularly appealing as it requires no action by the customer to hear your message; they are a ‘captive audience’.

Organizations that are focused on managing their customer relationships beyond the initial sale are better able to distinguish themselves from their competitors. For the call center, this means extending the value of the customer service function to driving enhanced productivity not only through the reduction of costs, but through driving new revenue opportunities.

Some of those opportunities may include:

• Promotions. Provide targeted, customized promotional messages or special offers to your callers.
• Upgrades and accessories. Communicate, and give the customer the opportunity to purchase, new versions of, or add-ons to, existing products or services, including warranties.
• Gift Cards. Provide access to purchase or redeem gift cards without the need for a live agent.
• Invitations to events. Extend invitations to open houses, special shopping events, or other events hosted by your organization.

To enhance the up-sell or cross-sell process, on-demand IVR applications and call center solutions can be designed to interact dynamically with your in-house customer purchasing data. By reaching into a database, the application can identify customers and their individual purchasing histories, triggering an appropriate offer from the application, customizing and personalizing the call experience.

Customer surveys can be used as part of the call process as a way to poll your customers and can often be administered during hold times. These surveys can be used for a variety of market research initiatives, from general customer satisfaction to evaluation of new products or promotions. This use of an IVR solution serves two purposes: it is a subtle way of reducing the perceived hold times and therefore increasing customer satisfaction. It also provides you with valuable marketing data for your organization.

From store locator services to order status to gift card redemption, an effective IVR solution can automate many standard customer inquiries while at the same time extending the value of your brand – even while you are not there. These solutions can also front-end your call center, helping regulate call length and issue resolution, promoting a positive customer experience.

Typically when introducing Angel.com’s Site Builder toolkit (the WYSIWIG editor used to build all customer voice applications within the Angel.com system) to a prospect, we use the analogy that the Angel.com “Voice Site” is like a website, and the “Voice Pages” that you piece together are like webpages.  I’m a reader of Search Engine Watch and I recently came across this article by Tim Ash titled “Roles vs. Personas vs. Cognitive Styles“.   Being written for a web design/optimization audience it was obviously aimed at explaining the various visitors who may visit a website and how to design/optimize the website for these unique visitors.  What struck me is that most companies put a lot of time, energy and money into building and tweaking the company website to optimize it for the best possible customer experience.  But many companies don’t realize that the other main public face of the company, their phone number, needs the same love and attention and should be given just as much “optimizational care” as their website.

Who calls a company’s toll-free number?  The same people who visit the company’s website!  Let’s take a look at the web visitor “Roles” that Tim outlines:

Roles correspond to specific classes of visitors interacting with your site. They are defined by their relationship to your Web site and call to action. The role breakdown can be basic, or it may need to be slightly more nuanced depending on your circumstances.  Here are some representative examples of possible roles:

• Consumer e-tail company: New visitors (who haven’t visited your site before), returning visitors (who have visited but haven’t bought yet), first-time buyers (trying to complete their first purchase), repeat buyers (who already have their information stored in your system), e-mail list members (who have signed up to hear about future special offers).
• Plumbing supply company: Retail customers (looking to buy an individual replacement part), plumbing contractors (need an array of parts for a specific customer job), wholesale buyers and real estate developers (need large volume price breaks and extended payment terms).
• Dating service: Prospective member (hasn’t signed up yet), new member (has paid but hasn’t set up a complete personal profile), experienced member (has done multiple searches and contacted other members).
• Educational-saving-plan provider: Future recipients (children under age 18), parents of recipients (who typically establish the plan), relatives and friends (who may contribute money to the plan).

If you think about it, each one of these is someone who could/would also call the company phone number.  Just as the website needs to be set up to handle each of these visitors, so does the main phone number of the company.  Whether the main phone number goes directly to an agent, or especially if there is an IVR system in place, designing the phone-based customer experience is critical to the public face/brand of the company.  Let’s look at a couple of these Roles and how the IVR could handle each:

• Consumer e-tail company:
  New Visitors (who haven’t called your company before): This is your chance to establish/re-establish your brand.  We’re going for brand consistency here.  These callers likely have come into contact with your brand before through your website, print ad, tv ad, etc.   If you have a “voice of the brand” for a tv spot, use that same voice in the greeting and prompts of the IVR system.  If you have been trying to project the message “we’re easy to do business with”, don’t send callers through an endless maze of options.  If you’re targeting a young, hip audience, use music and language appropriate to that audience.
  Repeat Buyers (who already have their information stored in your system): This one is a no-brainer and can certainly be one area where a streamlined IVR system can not only increase customer satisfaction, but also affect the company’s bottom line.  Integrate your phone system with your backend database or CRM system.  Your phone system can be set up to recognize the caller ID, and greet the caller by name, then give them automated information quickly such as their order status, last payment or gift card balance.  Then give them other options after you’ve already given them the info they’re likely seeking.  This makes the customer’s interaction quick, easy and pleasing, and takes some of the burden off your agents.
• Plumbing supply company:
  Plumbing Contractors or Wholesale Buyers: Completely different audience than a mainstream consumer brand.  These callers know you and have used you many times before.  Don’t set up a phone system that is generic — the IVR should cater to these established customers and make them want to keep coming back.  Personalize the flow by recognizing their repeat caller ID.  Keep the greeting brief since these callers typically know exactly what they need and they want it fast.  Give them touchtone options that they can memorize to get where they need to go within the IVR.  Allow for “barge-in” so they don’t have to listen to the entire prompt before selecting the option.  Again, keeping these customers happy can be crucial to their ongoing business with you.
• Educational-savings-plan provider:
  Relatives and friends (who may contribute money to the savings plan): Just like anyone can pay/donate money online, so can they over the phone.  An IVR for something like this should be instilled with the same “feel-goodness” that you find in the pictures of happy children that would likely be placed on a website for an educational savings plan.  Record the greeting and prompts with a warm, feel-good voice talent.  Use happy language throughout, and language that lets the caller know that this transaction is secure.  Make the donation process of putting in credit card information quick and painless; and, after the donation process is done, reinforce the security message and automate the process of getting a receipt to the caller.  A pleasant caller experience leads to more donations, which makes everyone happy.

As you can see, these descriptions of what you can do with the IVR systems of various companies has a common theme of “make things better for the caller and good things happen.”   Well, the mantra of Angel.com is “putting the caller first”, but doesn’t it just make sense?  A lot of time and energy is put into streamlining the web process.  Making information easier to find on a website makes the people looking for it happy.  Streamlining a form on a website landing page typically means more people will fill it out, which makes businesses happy.

The company website is not the only public face of the company.  In fact, the phone is often the biggest touch point between business and customer.  Everyone should think of their company phone number like their company website.  Make the phone interaction better and you make your callers and customers happy.  Happy customers makes businesses happy.

I got a kick out of the recent Speech-Tek webinar on the topic of Hosted vs. On-Premise IVR and Contact Center Solutions. The fact that vendors could pitch with a straight-face the value of an on-premise solution vs. a hosted/on-demand one is pretty interesting. Enterprise customers should beware! Companies like Avaya, Genesys and even Voxeo now, are selling on-premise, voice technology solutions that date back over a decade and require a substantial upfront cost, a yearly maintenance fee and a complete lack of flexibility when a customer wants to make improvements to drive an improved customer experience.

Enterprise customers like Pfizer, Astra Zeneca and Barnes & Noble, are quickly understanding the value of deploying a hosted/on-demand IVR solution. The benefits are substantial in the short and long-term: 1) LOWER COST: There are no/limited set-up fees for a hosted/on-demand offering vs. the extensive programming required for an on-premise solution. 2) FASTEST TIME TO MARKET: A new customer is literally up and running in a matter of hours or days vs. months for an on-premise offering. 3) IMPROVED FLEXIBLITY: An hosted/on-demand offering allows customers to make improvement on-the-fly vs. an on-premise one that can take weeks, as updated coding is required.

If you’re considering a replacement or new IVR or Contact Center solution, GO hosted/on-demand.

This case study illustrates one of the many reasons why speech recognition is difficult, both in design and implementation.

The following behavior is very difficult to deliver:

• “Tell me the name of a fruit that you like.”
• If we hear Pineapple, Banana, Grape, Raspberry, or Orange, do X
• If we hear any other fruit, do Y
• If we hear anything that doesn’t sound enough like the name of a fruit, do Z for Failure

Basket X, by itself, is not very problematic. Each item is given a line for the recognizer to match, explicitly. One can add in alternate spellings or pronunciations to help it interpret what it “hears”, like this:

• pineapple,pyneappul (do X1)
• banana (do X2)
• grape,grapes (do X3)
• raspberry,razzberry (do X4)
• orange,orrinj (do X5)

The recognizer receives an utterance (a series of sounds, considered together) from the human, and it scores that sequence against the list of fruit-name pronunciations that it “knows”. It assigns a Confidence Level, 0% up to 100%, for the one or several items on the list that appear to be the best match.

If the Confidence Level is above some assigned threshold, e.g. 45%, the recognizer returns that result as the best guess at what was said. But, if no item has received a score as high as the threshold, the returned value is No Match: the recognizer is not confident enough that the utterance matched anything on the list it is listening for. No Match? Do Z for Failure.

So far, that is not yet difficult. We always get back X1, X2, X3, X4, X5, or Z (No Match).

The system is ruined by the addition of the “any other fruit” basket, for behavior Y. The recognizer cannot know how to judge Y apart from Failure Z, unless it is given a comprehensive list of all the elements of Y that it might positively match. We must add all of these items:

• kiwi (do Y1)
• kumquat (do Y2)
• watermelon (do Y3)
• strawberry (do Y4)
• tangelo,tanjelo (do Y5)
• mango (do Y6)
• black raspberry (do Y7)
• apricot (do Y8)
• peach (do Y9)
• apple (do Y10)
• …, ad infinitum, (do Yn)

Suddenly, our list has grown from five easily-distinguishable items into a much longer list, merely by trying to add one “all other fruits” basket.

• Speech recognition works only on positive matches of known values. The recognizer cannot judge by any external attributes whether it sounded like the name of some fruit, through the meaning of the word. It does not even hear words. It hears only a sequence of meaningless sounds that it tries to match to a known list.
• The recognizer has no way to know if “watermelon” or “water moccasin” are fruits, or any way to distinguish the two items from one another, unless one or both of them are on the list of sounds it is trying to match.
• Again, we can’t build basket Y unless we have a complete list of all the individual fruits that should be in it.

With the addition of basket Y, the whole system begins to deliver results that humans would consider unacceptable failure:

• The more one tries to “teach” all possible fruits to the recognizer, the less capable it gets at distinguishing any of them.
• It becomes more difficult to say anything that will reliably return the No Match, Z, because we might accidentally hit something on the long list. If the human really said “beach”, a non-fruit, it is clearly not like anything in basket X; but, it hits too confidently on “peach” in basket Y, so we go to Y instead of Z.
• The longer the list is, {X1, X2, X3, …, Xm, Y1, Y2, Y3, …, Yn}, the greater the chance that the recognizer will occasionally mis-recognize some ordinary things, because there are too many similar-sounding items to judge.

Proper testing of the system becomes forbiddingly difficult, as well:

• To ensure the system’s accuracy, all of that list for behavior Y needs to be tested individually (kiwi, kumquat, watermelon, strawberry, tangelo, mango, black raspberry, apricot, peach, apple, … [hundreds of them]), to be sure that each known but unwanted fruit hits basket Y instead of the general Failure, Z.
• The fruits that we really care about most, in basket X, lose some of their valid hits: whenever the recognizer “hears” something in basket Y that returned a higher score than the one the human really said, in basket X. Perhaps the human said “pineapple”, and the system should have returned basket X, but part of the sound got cut off in transmission. Unknown to the human, the system heard only “-apple”, it found a match for “apple” in basket Y (with higher Confidence Level than “pineapple” in basket X), and returned an unexpected behavior. Stupid computer! I said “pineapple”, which doesn’t resemble an apple in any way! “I’m sorry, we don’t have that fruit today.” Huh? When did they run out of pineapple? (It’s not telling me that it really heard “apple”….)
• We must also ensure that an utterance intended for basket Y does not generate mistaken hits into basket X! Let’s see: I really said “black raspberry”, but the system heard only the “raspberry” part, and it acted accordingly. Meanwhile, I as an intelligent human am absolutely certain that I actually said “black raspberry”. Furthermore, I am certain that I intended to say “black raspberry”, and that I really mean “black raspberry”, not “raspberry”. How could the computer not recognize my intentions or my meaning? It seemed human enough, in the other interactions we have had during this session…. My mental model of the intelligent computer crashes, suddenly. Why did the computer suddenly become incompetent at understanding me?
• An attempt to improve the sensitivity of “pineapple” vs “apple” (or “black raspberry” vs “raspberry”) might not work, because we cannot predict or reproduce the transmission dropouts or noise that affected only that single experimental trial. The “pineapple” and “black raspberry” test cases certainly made the system seem broken, yes, but that was only one hit, each. It just happened to be on the tester’s first and only trial, setting the (perhaps mistaken) expectation that the whole system is not yet adequately accurate. Who wants to test the system 1000 times, with a representative set of humans and environmental conditions all properly controlled, just to be able to determine the proper experimental percentage of accuracy?

This past weekend Angel.com’s latest product release, dubbed “Fall ‘09″, was made available to all customers.  This is the latest in this years string of major releases.  Earlier this year we focused on upgrades for our Virtual Call Center product, giving more insight to supervisors and visibility for agents, increased call transfer control, and enhancing the security and stability of our platform.

Our latest release is the first wave of enhancements meant to put the caller first^SM.  This is the first in a string of 3 releases over the next 4 months, with the goal throughout all of them being to aid businesses in building and managing better IVR and call center solutions that will provide a better experience to their callers/customers.

The most exciting portion of this release is our Caller First^SM Diagnostics tool.  This tool, while it looks simple, is extremely powerful in creating and managing an IVR solution.  Throughout the building and management lifecycle, Angel.com customers can run this diagnostics tool to help identify potential issues, such as broken links, orphaned files within the call flow, missing audio prompts, and places where a TTS (text-to-speech) prompt may still reside instead of an audio file.  Now you can identify potential issues in the IVR solution before your customers do.  Anyone who has gone through the tedious and extensive process of calling into a recently built IVR solution to test and identify where the call flow is broken knows how beneficial it would be to have an automated testing tool to handle this.  In addition, the Caller First Diagnostics tool allows you to build your IVR or call center solution completely with TTS prompts, crafting each prompt in text, before recording the prompts with professional voice talent.  When you are done crafting, simply run the Diagnostics tool, and it will generate an exportable Excel file with every TTS prompt and it’s proper placement within the Voice Site.  This is a huge time-savings tool.

In the Fall ‘09 Release, we also put up the structural basis for our future Enterprise Reporting Suite release.  This will be a major shift in the way our customers can compile and report on data within their IVR and call center solutions.

The Following are additional features and functionality from our Fall ‘09 Release:

More than double the number of Hang-Up pages. We’ve expanded the number of hang-up pages from 2 to 5 to enable a larger number of available actions and options after a call completes.

Generate random values with Logic Pages. Easily generate confirmation numbers or randomize application processes. With our latest release, random values can automatically be assigned to a variable in alpha string, number, alpha-numeric string, or number string.

Angel.com reporting enhancements. We’ve updated our reporting functionality, providing you access to double the web results displayed on all reports, improved Call Analyzer performance, and the ability to view call variables from the Call History Report.

Stay tuned for more updates over the coming month!

Today, Angel.com issued a press release highlighting the company’s participation in the city-wide launch of the Notify NYC Program. The Notify NYC Program is a citizen warning system that was created to enhance New York City’s public communication channels by distributing critical text and voice messages directly via the Web, e-mail and SMS text messages. Angel.com will manage the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system to streamline the registration process for those who want to receive notifications from the City and also facilitate internal communications amongst City employees and work groups.

“Notify NYC gives people a chance to prepare for emergencies before they actually happen. By using Angel.com’s IVR technology, callers can easily become a part of this program so they can be automatically informed of any critical event.”

This is an amazing program that we can see being rolled out in a number of cities across the US.  While residents can register for Notify NYC online, the IVR registration line allows people to immediately sign up for this program wherever they hear about it.  This is one of the biggest benefits of such phone-based IVR applications — it brings immediacy to all consumers.  The likelihood that resident of NYC will only hear about this program while sitting at home with their laptop, or at work while a computer is handy is slim.  The IVR registration allows residents who hear about this while reading the paper on the subway, or from a friend at the local coffee shop to immediately dial 3-1-1 and register on the spot, before they forget about it as they go about their day.

For speed and simplicity sake, entering a telephone number and a zip code is all that is required for registrants to receive notifications in case of emergencies. Multiple account management features enable registrants to add, change or remove additional phone numbers, zip codes and notification types.

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