We had 100% turn out for Take Your Kids to Work Day! Between the free donuts and banana bread, plus schwag from OpenMethods and various conferences like notepads, stickers and markers, what’s not to love, but it’s a small company, so I didn’t know what to expect. After accommodating schedules, dogs, allergies and naptimes, our first annual TYKTWD was fun for those involved and had minimal impact to the rest of the team since they were away at a Genesys conference – perfect! We even took a short walking tour around the Market to see the Steamship Arabia and have lunch at Succotash. See pics. (Nevermind that I’ve worked on Take Our DAUGHTERS to Work Day for a decade…It’s like we said in college – “Why WOMEN’S studies? – because men have a class just for them already, it’s called HISTORY”.) Still, fun either way and it just so happened that all the children involved were girls anyway J.

Simonie

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Which leads me to the phone system at MO Gas Energy …moving house and combining two households recently, I was in the situation to turn off and start gas service at two different locations. My fiance’ called to start service at our new house since we would be moving in there before we closed on my old house. He told a long story of woe about how he called and got through the maze of DTMF only to leave his name and number for a “call back” from the system estimated to be in a few hours, rather than wait on the line, again estimated at a few hours. The NEXT day, he had to call back again himself, having never received the original call back, and go through the whole process again. He finally ended up going into the Gas Company and changing it in person. The following week, I decided to find out for myself how bad the system was and call to disconnect my service, fully expecting to wait for say, an hour on hold. When the system said it would be 3.5 hrs, I decided to go down the path to see if the wait for a callback was shorter or longer, but it was the same as well. I hung up and let it fester. Then I called back and decided to do something I have never done before, but it has been in the press with GetHuman. I relentlessly pressed “0” for the operator until it submitted to my will and after 5 times, I got a live person, happy to help me disconnect immediately and the call took about 20 seconds.

Now, you might think I’m happy with this result. Not so. First, it must be noted that I am one of those supposedly rare people who prefer not to speak to a human at all, however slow and mundane the system. That aside, I can say that the MO Gas Energy system is just as broken as the Moviefone system. It is not right or fair that because of my insider industry knowledge, that I was able to get direct help. Unlike people on the GetHuman site, I know that automated systems are in place to help those needing complicated assistance, not simple disconnects. I know that MO Gas Energy tried. I know that their agents are overworked and their customers are dissatisfied with supposedly helpful messages that tell them how long their wait will be. I would like to volunteer to redesign their system as well, even in DTMF it could be made much more efficient and satisfying for all. Just a question here, but did this system get worse when AOL bought it? Just an innocent question…

Simonie

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Has the industry abandoned prompt concatenation? I mean, yes, you can hear recorded voices stumbling over numbers and words on just about any system you tune into, but is anyone trying to make this better still, or is it just me? Is the industry just waiting for tts to become tolerable enough to use fulltime, or for users to get used to broken speech enough to accept it? This is how I describe my job at cocktail parties when asked: “You know those systems you call and talk to a computer instead of a person, like the phone company?“ <insert long pause for customary rolling of the eyes or grunt of disgust> “Well, I make them better.” <smile>. I’ve even read research lately where some would say it’s easier on the ears to hear a prompt entirely in tts rather than with as much recorded as possible and only the most dynamic data in tts. What burns me is that I’ve worked with the best in the business in this area and saw her talent wasted by bureaucracy and lack of vision. If we want it, it’s attainable – high quality, pre-recorded, concatenated speech for much more content than we are, well, content with now. Please let me help you help you.

Simonie

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