I was already familiar with the Tipping Point theories Malcolm Gladwell covered in his keynote speech at SpeechTEK East last month, but he presented several examples I had not previously heard. I hadn’t applied the theories to the speech space yet, but his examples struck a chord with me. The public perception of IVRs has gotten so bad that we’re now in the middle of a full blown backlash. We’ve conquered much of the technological problems holding us back and we’ve come up with some really good design guidelines based on years of usability research, but the reputation built upon years of user dissatisfaction is what’s getting us now. So I got to thinking. We need to come up with a product or service that can only be accessed through Voice. Something that is so compelling and new that a large market (perhaps teenagers) clamors for it, having never even thought of it before, and then put a voice only interface on it. Not just any voice interface, but the best of the best. Use the best technology all around and the best design, budget and legal issues be damned. But here’s the key, the way you access it, in this case via voice, is irrelevant, beside the point. It’s the “thing” itself, the product or service that compels people to use any means necessary to access it. This forces them to use the technology and see how good it can be while simultaneously taking the emphasis away from it.
This compares to Gladwell’s fundamental example about the first live sporting event on the radio. In that example, he shows how radio had already been around for awhile, people knew about it, the technology worked well, and there were even radio stations out there utilizing it, but the public wasn’t buying it. Why? Because the radio only brought them news, something they could already get on their own through several newspapers a day. It wasn’t until something totally new and unheard of was created – broadcasting the boxing match of the century over the radio – that people noticed that radios could do more. In this case, the product/service of getting to hear a live event at home rather than travel and pay to see it, was the compelling feature and the method through which to get it – using a radio – was beside the point. They wanted the live sporting events in their home and the radio was the only way to get it, so the next day they all went out and bought one! We need our own “boxing match” to make available via voice to get people past thinking voice is just a redundant bad method to bring them the same information they used to be able to get from live people.
As long as customers are making a comparison, like getting the news over the radio versus from their old reliable newspapers, we will lose, or at least it will take a lot longer to win. Let’s put our heads together and come up with that “killer app” as they say, but in a different way than we’ve been thinking of it before. This killer app has nothing to do with voice or customer service, but bursts on the scene like the ipod, texting. or YouTube , but in this case, it is a must have product that just happens to be accessed by voice. My backup plan is simpler. Let’s agree to start all our apps like this: “Welcome to <insert company and service name here>. WAIT, don’t hang up!”.
 
–Simonie
