CRM - July 2008 - (Page 41)

THE VOICE USER INTERFACE PROBLEM HAS LONG BEEN THE STICKING POINT IN AUTOMATED SUPPORT SYSTEMS. WHY CAN’T DESIGNERS DESIGN A SYSTEM WORTH TALKING ABOUT? • by Christopher Musico For Alicia Lydecker, a 21-year-old graduating senior at Syracuse University, spring break was supposed to be the time of her life. She would finally be able to take the European trip she always dreamed about. Before she could ride the gondolas in Venice or admire the Eiffel Tower in Paris, though, she says she wanted to contact her banks and credit card company because she didn’t want any issues with making abnormal purchases. “I was calling because I was going out of the country, and I needed to inform them so that [my credit-card company] wouldn’t freeze my account,” she recalls, on the assumption that sudden purchases made outside the U.S. would probably arouse suspicions. Making sure overseas travel arrangements and school responsibilities are squared away is difficult enough, especially for Lydecker, who also works three jobs in addition to her fulltime student status. So when she called up her credit-card company, she says she was less than thrilled to reach its interactive voice response (IVR) system. She immediately decided to use the touch-tone options instead of going the speech selfservice route, because of prior experiences. “I just [used the buttons] because I’ve spoken [to the IVR] in the past and it only recognizes what I say half the time—and I really didn’t want to be bothered,” she laments, noting she always makes it a point to call from inside her dorm room where there is no outside noise interfering. So instead of being able to say “security” or “fraud department,” Lydecker waded through the maze of push-button menu options—and found nothing to her liking. “I ended up just waiting until the end and choosing the ‘speak to a service representative’ option,” she recalls. Lydecker was eventually able to get the information she needed, and she didn’t have any issues when purchasing food, drinks, and souvenirs as she trekked across Europe in March. But the fact that she had to spend her precious time avoiding her credit-card company’s speech-enabled service system is a common complaint many make of IVR systems.“If the speech option worked correctly, I think that would be much easier AYWHAT ? [than using touch tones],” Lydecker posits. “But I’m normally in a hurry, and I don’t want to deal with error prompts when the system can’t understand my voice.” Lydecker isn’t alone in her negative experience with IVR systems. Virtually everyone who has ever called one of these systems has at least one horror story to tell about how difficult it was to navigate through the menu or speak the magic response to proceed. Web sites such as GetHuman (www.gethuman.com) have been created just to allow consumers to sound off on the experiences they’ve had as well as ways to “get around” an IVR system. (See the Customer Centricity column, “GetHuman? Get Real,” March 2007, page 10, for more.) According to GetHuman’s Web site, its goal is to “convince enterprises that providing high-quality customer service and having satisfied customers costs much less than providing low-quality customer service and having unsatisfied customers.” The Web site has even gotten the attention of IVR designers like Dave Pelland, director of a design collaborative for Dallas-based automated information solutions provider Intervoice.“Companies started to get bad press based on these IVRs, and that has clearly changed their attitude,” Pelland explains.“When [companies] come to us now, they’re much more open and willing to listen to us experts tell them how to solve this problem.” Love IVR or hate it, automation and speech self-service are not going away for the foreseeable future. A recent Datamonitor study, “Understanding the Changing Role of IVR in Evolving Infrastructures,” concludes that global investment in IVR licenses will increase from $475 million in 2006 to $845 million by 2012. So if companies are throwing millions of dollars into their IVR systems, voice user interface (VUI) design should be a major point of emphasis in order to ensure the investment is money well spent. Many speech designers and engineers say that VUI design is a mixture of art and science, so while there are some mustavoid mistakes, simply crossing them off a list doesn’t guarantee success. Phillip Hunter, vice president of interaction design for New York–based contact center automation technology provider SpeechCycle, calls this the “recipe mentality.” “If I can just go pull the right recipe from the cookbook, then I don’t have to know anything about food or temperatures to be able to produce it,” he explains. “That might work if you’re CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | JULY 2008 41 http://www.gethuman.com

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

CRM - July 2008 Contents Front Office Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point CRM’s a Social Animal SAP Looks to ‘Change the Game' CRM on Twitter CRM to the Max A Prescription for Satisfaction Required Reading Cover Story: Is Microsoft Winning the CRM Race? Jumping into the SaaS Pool Say What? Another Bright Idea Out of Edison A Small Biz Blossoms Biting Off the Right Amount Something for a Rainy Day Connect Re:Tooling Pint of View

CRM - July 2008

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