www.gethuman.com, yeah, it’s an interesting site, when considering the 1 million dissatisfied IVR customers it represents, but the site isn’t about making IVRs better, it’s just about eliminating them altogether. Companies only receive an “A” grade if they have no IVR at all, just a “hold for an agent” situation. You can get a “B” if you have a short initial prompt that includes a specific option to talk to an agent, easily satisfied. Their goal is for all companies to roll back to full agent call handling, rather than facing reality and working within the system. We’ll just have to wait and see about that. Let’s not make this out to be something it isn’t. It ISN’T a new concept. It ISN’T even aimed at improving the voice experience. It IS a concept created by people who don’t want to talk to an automated service at all – Voice or DTMF. With that in mind, putting them in charge of a bill of rights for those who are willing to and even sometimes prefer to have an automated experience is completely the wrong approach. Don’t get me wrong, I want to continue account for this group of people in the automated field, but I also want to account for those people who actually want a better automated experience because they don’t like talking to humans at all. In reality, it’s everyone in between that make up the bulk of our users and that is where we have been and shall continue to be investing our greatest work. In the GetHuman world, it is easy enough to accommodate their requirements, under the “as long as you’re going to have an automated system anyway” category: give an obvious and early out to an operator and don’t use overlong prompts, which are commonly held guidelines for most systems anyway. Getting vendors and designers to agree on the implementation is another issue.

Simonie

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Usability is as much a part of the software process and QA, people. Nowhere is this more clear to me than in VUI. I’ve worked with many companies, large and small, and even when Usability has a bullet in the outline of a project from the template the company gives out as the standard starting place, it still gets left out. Exactly what are we going to do when we construct and launch an entire system without user input? <toilet> Usability on VUI can be an unobtrusive, iterative process, starting very early in a project with casual WoZ and “ending” with lab studies on a “finished” project. The quotes in the last sentence are to note the fact that VUI is a dynamic medium, needing almost constant change and monitoring, much like Web work, so there is no real “end” or “finish” when done correctly. Usability turns into Tuning on a more established system, but is just as necessary. A holistic look at the application drift that often comes over time to a VUI near you, is necessary to keep your users happy. Don’t be satisfied with monopoly in any of its forms either. Just because your user base has numbers because it is forced to use your system for the lack of other avenues to your company or competing companies, doesn’t mean your system is working.

Simonie

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