 |
A project to make businesses more aware of their customer experience, and how to fix it. By Mark Hurst. |
| About Mark Hurst | Mark's Gel Conference | New York Times Story on This Is Broken | Newsletter: Subscribe | RSS Feed |
Search this site:
Categories:
- Advertising
- Current Affairs
- Customer Service
- Fixed
- Food and Drink
- Just for Fun
- Misc
- Not broken
- Place
- Product Design
- Signs
- Travel
- Web/Tech
Previous: Old Navy sign | Main | Next: Misspelled flying hog
September 11, 2004 12:34 AM
Broken: Voice-activated (IVR) phone service
When I call a toll-free 800 number to get customer service, I want to use the phone's touch-tone buttons to make selections. Instead, increasingly I have inane conversations with phone-bots: "Please speak the option you want." "Operator." "I'm sorry, I didn't catch that..."
How hard would it be to just say, "Press 0 for operator" and let the caller dial their response?
A New York Times article from Sept 9 talks about the state of the technology today. In one example, saying "That's it" was mistaken as "Athens, Greece." Broken.
Microsoft's product activation number has this. The problem I've had is that after reading in the 30 odd numbers it gets to the end and has to transfer me to a live operator because it couldn't do it automatically. What makes that even more broken yet is that after getting transferred to a live operator I have to repeat that whole string of numbers.
Argh. I don't even want to think about doing product activation over the phone-- letters and numbers can be REALLY hard to distinguish with all that distortion, even for humans, and especially for those of us with poor hearing. ("Was that 'D5B' or 'E9C'?")
I tried to tell a recording to "shut up", and it said something like, "Did you say, Karab, Saudi Arabia?"
Our Bell phone service, apparently when you start using vulgar language, it will connect you to complaints :P
I recently encountered similar problems with a cable company's system. I found that "customer service representative" worked better than "human" or "live person", both for the cable company and the phone company I called soon after.
I guess these telephony engineers/designers think that on some subconscious level we'll assocate computers with real operators if we can just speak to them. But I just feel weird doing that, even if it worked 100%. That's why I never bothered with speech recognition on my computer. When I want to interact with a machine, pushing buttons is just more natural.
Another disadvantage to requiring verbal input rather than touch-tones: Any amount of background noise makes it much less likely that the interpreting software will understand correctly. Many airlines now have the "cute" computer personality that you can speak to so it feels less impersonal. Only problem is that when I'm calling it to get current arrival/departure info or similar, I'm usually either in the noisy airport, or in a speeding car wondering if I'm going to miss my pickup. Either way, I'm screaming non-sequitors into the phone and still being misunderstood. The ones that do/did accept touch-tones allow me to put the phone on mute (look ma, no background noise!) and just hit touch tones, which works admirably. Some of these systems now allow either voice or touch-tone, which I think is perfect. It allows anyone happier with the voice option to still use it, but doesn't force it upon those of us who don't wanna.
Works for anyone out there still using a rotary phone too. ;)
Incidentally, two posts from comp.risks about issues with automated voice-recognition systems expecting a particular pronunciation of "operator":
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/17.15.html#subj8.1
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/18.01.html#subj5.1
Heck, given how many times I'm misheard by actual *humans*, it'd probably be easier for me to plug the expected response into a speech synthesizer and have the computer say it instead! :-p
What bugs me about entering numbers into the phone is that you almost always end up telling the person what you just typed in! Didn't your (s/n, ID#, etc.) get recorded when you typed it??
Comments on this entry are closed
Previous: Old Navy sign | Main | Next: Misspelled flying hog
Not to mention that the system only wants a particular pronunciation of "operator"-- if your accent's just slightly different than what it expects, you're totally out of luck.
Posted by: codeman38 at September 11, 2004 09:05 PM