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Why Do Companies Stick with Voice Menus?
eliot1785 asks: "We've all had to put up with this at one point or another — you call a company for customer service or tech support, and rather than getting traditional touch-pad menu options, you encounter an annoying system that wants you to 'just say' how it can help you. Invariably, the system fails to understand your input, or picks up background noise or coughs as intended inputs. After a few failures, you have to press '0' to speak with an operator. Why do companies think that customers like these voice menu systems? Is there any research to suggest that they do, or are companies simply embracing the systems because they are new technology? More importantly, when will they realize that the systems don't work and go back to the traditional touch-pad menu option systems?"
I've had several successful interactions with these systems, most recently with United Airlines just the other day. Anecdotal, to be sure, but proves the systems have at least some worth.
It is obvious. Companies DON'T want you to contact them. They want self-service or no service. They can give the sorry illusion of TRYING to help you by offering phone systems. In reality, they hope you give up. Service costs money. They'd rather have high maintenance indivduals go to another company and be a burned to them.
And in reality, customers flock to the low cost provider. Serves them right when they get what thy paid for.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Personally, I haven't had any real trouble using the voice interaction services that my cable company provides. I do try to call from a quiet spot though, and do tend to have to speak more clearly and loudly than I do to the service rep that I eventually get.
I use ivr systems all the time, I almost NEVER have them misunderstand me.
ennunciation at times helps.. pausing between #'s helps.
I know a lotta eastern europeans, they all scream bloody murder when they try...
you could always refer to http://gethuman.com/ if you just can't take it
The most popular part of the gethuman website is the gethuman database of secret phone numbers and codes to get to a human when calling a company for customer service. (See also our general tips.)
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
We all try to follow the rule: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." IT follows a similar rule: "if it ain't broke but fixing it justifies my job, we'll fix it."
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2B1ASK1
Surveys have been done that show more people get more pissed off about being transferred than they do for having to sit through a menu before they speak to someone. Automated information available on many can save the customers time, which is another reason they are so popular.
They aren't specifically for driving people away. They exist to reduce teh need for them to speak to someone in the first place, and if that fails, to help ensure they speak to the right person right away.
IIRC, the AMTRAK system was recently praised on CBS News as being the "most user friendly" system. There was a recent coneference/expo of voice system vendors and apparently the most-desired system was the one that AMTRAK used or ones that could copy what AMTRAK does.
I'm pretty sick this week. Having never used my insurance with a doctor before, I called in.
::beep:: ::beep:: ::beep:: ::beep:beep:beep:beep:beep:beep:beep:beep:beep:bee p:beep:beep:beep:beep:beep:beep:beep:beep:beep:bee p:beep:beep:: ::pause:: ::pause:: ::pause::
"Welcome to bla bla... to speak with someone regarding covered facilities press 6"
"If your Insur-ID begins with a W, press 1"
"If the W is followed by three numbers and a hyphen or dash, press 1"
"Please type in your complete Insur-ID. You can enter letters by-"
"If this is an emergency, please hang up and dial 911."
"Please hold."
"Due to unusually high call volume [8am saturday], we are experiencing higher-than-usual wait time. Your expected wait time is Two. Minutes. And. Five. Seconds. Please continue to hold."
"Thanks for using Enormous insurence inc, may I please have your date of birth, Insur-ID...."
That's as verbatim as I can remember it. Seriously. Can you imagine an elderly person trying to do this... up hill, both ways, with a rotary phone, in the snow?
I lump the voice and keypad menus in the same boat -- I just want to talk to a
person as quick as possible.
My complaint about these system's isn't that they're harder to use -- most of the ones I've tried work well, as long as you use the limited vocabulary that the computer is programmed to understand. I don't like them because they're less efficient than the keypad for numeric input, and because (in many cases, though not all) you aren't given any option other than to speak aloud.
What if you're in a busy office environment and you don't want to disturb your coworkers, or have people listening in to your conversation with a machine?
What if you're at home in the early morning or late at night and don't want to disturb the other members of the household (roommate, significant other, baby, whatever)?
What if you've lost your voice through injury or illness?
I'll agree that for a long list of multiple-choice options, voice-recognition systems are a vast improvement over numeric menus. But at least they should all leave the option of providing digital input to a computerized system.
I had an AI prof who used to work on these kinds of systems at Lucent. He told us that one of the usability bits they ran into was trying to detect when the AI was in over its head. Apparently, swearing proved to be a good indicator. So if you ever want to bypass the machine, just say "earmuffs" to your kids and start spewing profanity into the phone. I've never tried it myself, but if nothing else, I imagine it would be somewhat satisfying as a last resort.
The truth is that good service is cost-prohibitive. It would be great if every ISP had a team of operators whose sole job is to find out what you need and directly transfer you to the proper department, but people cost money, to the tune of 25-30k yearly. That same money can be pumped into an irritating phone system that not only does the same job without a salary, but also deters a non-negligible number of callers and forces them to try other solutions. Let's face it: some people are addicted to phones.. when I was running a retail shop, I had people call me up for no reason at all, they were just creepy losers trying to kill time by talking to a semi-stranger. In the case of tech support, it's even worse because people are just plain ignorant and they expect everyone to hold their hand. I don't care that "you" paid "good money" for "a high end computer", or that "you" will "take" your "business" "elsewhere" if I don't clean out *YOUR* spyware and send you a "FREE" copy of MS Office because you "misplaced" your CD. Phones enable stupidity because people eventually learn to rely on the phone rather than use their own brain. How many times have you had someone call you with a question, only to end up saying "Nevermind, I just figured it out", just after they've talked your ear off and indirectly accused you for their ignorance, nevermind interrupting your lv60 raid while a 350$/hr hooker was peeing on your rug in seven different languages.
If someone can come up with an even more hostile, alienating device for call centers, I'm rooting for them!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Amtrak's 'Julie' is actually one of the most advanced systems out there. It rarely misses a prompt and recovers gracefully if it does. (It even works while calling from a train doing 90mph in the middle of nowhere Iowa, that's an achievement all its own)
Between their website and voice system, there is a lot going on behind the scenes. Train travel is actually pretty difficult to book trips and maintain status, it's all the stops, and the literally hundreds of possibilities you can have for one trip.
I'm not always in my nice private home when I want to deal with these things. So I'm supposed to say my "sixteen digit account number" out loud in the fucking airport, train station, office, or whatever? I don't think so. Of course the one's that ask you to punch it in alwas give to some idiot that asks for it again anyway. You can't win.
The only two words I say are "Agent" and "Operator." Grumble, grumble, grumble. Someone else already posted the gethuman database link It's a lifesaver.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Good luck.
Unsubsidized travel doesn't make money.
Now, if Amtrak could have the state and federal government run all their stations and maintain their tracks at a fraction of the cost, (Like they do with airports) then I'm betting they could turn a nice profit.
It is totally NOT okay for telephone directory assistance.
Understanding human speech is quite difficult. Directory assistance requires the computer to parse pretty much arbitrary words, which is the most difficult task in understanding speech--you have an entire lexicon and can't weight any set of words much. On the other hand, if you're creating an automated flight booking system, then you only have a limited range of vocabulary that you even need to consider. That is much easier--or at least, you get a much greater confidence in your accuracy.
You might get modded funny, but I'd give it a +1 informative.
After moving last month I navigated quite a number of these systems, ranging from Not Completely Infuriating to Horrible. (Yes, I enunciate clearly, you smart asses)
After the sixth time the electric company's system misunderstood me I said "Fuck you!" very clearly to which it responded with "I thought I heard you say you'd like to talk to an operator. Please wait while we connect you."
Subsequent use of that colorful phrase gave me an operator in about 3/4 of the voice menus I tried.
It can be a much more than that. AT&T was able to reduce the number of long distance operators by 99% and replaced them with a voice recognition system ( I worked on this product ). This was the first use of speech recognition in the US long distance phone network, see:
http://www.research.att.com/index.cfm?portal=27 ( scroll down to 1992 ) and look for VRCP.
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
Having personally worked as both a representative and a team lead at an inbound call center (for Virgin Mobile, actually) I can say that these things can be necessary. We had one of these systems named Simone, and I can't begin to explain how many times I heard customer's complain about "her". One day I decided to try to get through the process and see how long it would take me following various routes to get to a live advisor, and it was NEVER over 2 minutes, and only 20-30 seconds for most requests. We needed this system because one advisor could not solve every issue. We had temporary reps who could only handle payments and activations, standard reps who could handle most anything, TSG reps (my department) that would deal with port requests, and our Saves team for deactivations.
Without Simone's routing we would have spent an incredible amount of time just transferring between representatives, and the temp reps would have never worked.
I work in the industry...
First, the reason why companies are attached to this is that a successful transaction is cheaper then a human transaction, period. In most cases 100x cheaper (even if it is sent to India). So even if only 10-20% of people use it, then it often pays for itself easily.
Of course the problem is that a lot of companies don't spend enough time (and therefore money) in making the systems work well. We often try to get containment (having someone do a full transaction in a voice system) to get above 60%. If we can do that, then we are doing well. That of course isn't the easiest thing to do. If you are good at it, there are a lot of tools to analyze what people are saying and how to respond, because invariably you will get it wrong at some point or another.
I get super frustrated myself when companies do stupid things. You have to be very careful with "speak anything" sort of interfaces. This is often called "open speech" and I still don't think the technology is quite there yet. It is much better to go with a "directed dialog" interface that give you 3-4 choices that are easy to understand.
Another thing that a lot of companies don't think about is integrating the self service system with a human being. Even if the technology is brilliant, there are going to be certain things that can't be done in the automated system. Most companies simply transfer the calls, and if you get lucky, your account number might travel with the call. Personally I like to focus on making a robust sort of integration, so that if you get you get 1/2 way through something and have to speak to a human, that human is given all the information about your transaction, so you don't have to start over and can pick up right where you left off.
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
I work in tech support. I've been a part of the decision process that has watched us go from live pickup to a touchtone system to voice.
I've watched upper management decide that we need to push people to the web.
Well trained people cost money.
Poorly trained people cost less money.
Poorly trained people who you don't have to worry about accents cost even less.
But make it hard enough to get support, and the support costs become profits when support is completely unused.
Upper management has decided that the people who call support in the corporate world are not the people who buy the equipment or have buying influence.
So, piss off the techies, and they just won't call. Their company will still buy from us.
More money for the shareholder.
My mom says I'm cool.
Now, imagine if JetBlue had to build and maintain its own runways. Your $200 flight to LA just became $900.
Aren't landing fees supposed to cover that?
I always tought that ATC was the biggest government expenditure related to air travel.
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