CRM - January 2008 - (Page 37)

VUI DESIGN “What doesn’t work is if you give people multiple examples,” she says. “[Some users] think those are the only options they’ve got. Obviously, not every caller is going to believe that, but enough people do believe that it’s a menu.” Instead of toggling with the syntax, the most direct remedy, for Hura, is to give people only a single example. Additionally, excessive instruction might irritate callers. While it’s important for end users to stay oriented within an IVR, there’s also the danger of making the system sound pedantic. Most VUI designers realize the best way to handle instruction is to distribute it throughout the script, presenting it only when callers are likely to use it. For instance, if the IVR asks for an account number and the caller doesn’t give a valid response, the system could react by saying, To move on, I need your account number. You can find your account number in the blue box just under your name on your account statement. “All conversations with VUIs are made out of building blocks, which you see over and over again.” It does little good to have, at the beginning of the call, a prompt that chirps, Remember, at any point in this call, you can say Help, Repeat, Main Menu, or Goodbye, because at any point during the call, end users are more likely to forget and simply hang up. Distinction needs to be drawn, however, between providing instruction and building a feature that provides more detailed direction in navigating the system the moment the caller explicitly asks for it. “There are people who will still say you have to allow callers to say Help everywhere and respond to it with a so-called helpful prompt,” says Phillip Hunter, vice president of the Voice Interaction Group at SpeechCycle. “There’s another camp that says Help doesn’t get used, and when it does, it gets used poorly.” Hura clarifies: “From my experience in usability testing, when people say Help, what they really want is a person. When you offer them help and give them anything other than a transfer to a human being, they feel fooled.” EVER SO FORMAL The storm over whether or not to program a personality into an IVR has calmed, with most VUI designers settling for a happy medium. Different demographics have different expectations, so the question of formality needs to be assessed on a case-by-case basis. “Words have a lot of power,” Nuance’s Kilgore says. And formality, he adds, exists on a spectrum instead of at two separate poles. Even at its most refined, a system’s formality shouldn’t be distracting. I’ll look up your account now is http://www.salesguru.com http://www.salesguru.com http://www.salesguru.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - January 2008

CRM - January 2008 Contents Front Office Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point Facebook's About-Face On the Scene: Oracle OpenWorld 2007 CRM Market Set to Double Customers, Meet your Makers Required Reading Oh, Behave! Fine-Tuning the Channel Listen Up! The Master Piece Flying High on Customer Service Let's Get Digital The Big Rigs Get Revved Up Putting Asia in Your Pocket Secret of My Success Connect Re:Tooling Pint of View

CRM - January 2008

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