CRM - January 2008 - (Page 38)

VUI DESIGN polite, yet natural. By contrast, I will now look up your account plunks the adverb in an aurally awkward place and unwinds the contraction, as if the designer were writing a Victorian novel instead of a VUI prompt. One way to keep a system from sounding too stilted is through idioms that don’t feel idiomatic—phrases that have become so embedded in the language design they often go unnoticed.“I’m often asking our designers to keep an eye out for phrases that are naturalistic,” Kilgore says. For example, while a prompt that says OK, you’re good to go, might be too hokey, one that says You’re scheduled for an appointment on Thursday at 2 p.m. Does account number. But there’s a distinction between the first person singular and the first person plural. In the first sentence, the machine misunderstood the caller, so it apologizes. In the second, however, it uses We not to indicate itself, but to indicate the entire institution it represents. An alternative wording might simply go: Sorry, we need to get your account number. In this instance, Sorry isn’t so much an apology—which might sound unnatural coming from a machine—but a synonym for Pardon me, a way of acknowledging that something in the discourse went awry. This avoids the possibility that the machine is making a bigPolkosky is particularly in tune with the pragmatic, social uses of language. A system that states Please say X, Y, or Z might seem too dictatorial. Would you like X, Y, or Z? aligns more with the customer-friendly environment most callers expect. While some VUI designers might find that prompt too indirect, Polkosky argues that the tone allows the system space to be more direct if necessary in places such as error recovery. Regardless, VUI designers tend to agree that initial prompts should be clear and not too numerous—maxed out around three or four to avoid confusing the caller, particularly at such an early stage in the interaction. SpeechUsability’s Hura, however, says that short-term memory is more complex than that. Accordingly, a more important factor than “total number of options in a list” would be how distinct each prompt is from the others. Whichever side is correct, both agree that the clarity of the prompts is paramount. “If somebody calls into a bank application and wants to get a copy of last month’s bank statement, you have to make sure it’s pretty obvious at that top menu which option they need to choose to get to their bank statement,” Pelland says. With every rule of thumb, there is a caveat, alternative, or addendum— partly because the approach to each VUI should be assessed individually and design-based decisions should be dependent on caller demographics and the desires of the individual client. The industry’s increasing focus on customer satisfaction has changed the way designers approach their craft. “Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music,” Truman Capote once said.“If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.” VUI design has a different set of rules than the art of fiction—but it’s also a markedly newer form, still too immature, most designers contend, for any rules except the broadest to be firmly entrenched. Contact us at editor@destinationCRM.com. www.destinationCRM.com One way to keep a system from sounding too stilted is through idioms that don’t feel idiomatic. that still work for you? is less noticeable. Others include What’s a good day for you? or You’re all set. All are phrases that have become commonplace in everyday conversation—even conversations with human customer-care representatives. Of course, an IVR isn’t a human—and there’s still debate about whether a system’s language should include the first person.“Almost everybody now is used to hearing an I’m sorry apology if the system can’t recognize you,” Intervoice’s Pelland says. “The question is, really, ‘How much do you put that in all of the prompting?’” According to Gilbert, the answer depends on the end user. Teenagers who spent their formative years raised by a PlayStation are accustomed to encountering personas, and would naturally be more accepting of an IVR that had a personality. By contrast, he says, if “you have another group of people who are not technology-savvy, you want your system to come across as this dumb computer.” Nevertheless, the programming of a personality is a nuanced practice. “First person is a lot trickier than people make it out to be,” Hura says. For instance, when the system needs to take responsibility for what’s happening—say it misunderstands the caller—it might say Sorry, I didn’t get that. We need to get your 38 ger deal out of an error than it should. “Errors in communication are rampant in every conversation,” Polkosky says. “If you design [the system] right, [and] your initial prompts and errorrecovery structure appropriately, then [callers] won’t perceive them as errors.” PUTTING IT TOGETHER How do you design a system so that it makes for a pleasing customer experience? For Kilgore, whose background working with popular media often had him assembling music and film, the entire process is like putting together a plot line: The writer has to decide whether a given sentence pushes the narrative forward.“When somebody calls up a system,” he says, “they’re listening to a three- or five-minute story, not thinking of the atomic details.” When Polkosky revised a technical support call center for a major consumerelectronics company, she faced a creaky system with a verbose, aggressive style. So she resequenced the prompts to offer the easy questions first and the harder questions later. “One of the pieces of feedback when we implemented that [new] system was that it delivered customers to reps much calmer and ready to be helped,” she says,“as opposed to being even angrier than they were before.” CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | JANUARY 2008 http://www.destinationCRM.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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