Stupid Computer!

>офис обзавежданеtoo often IVR systems get blamed for a poor user experience. The impulse to blame the user interface for a poor customer experience is common, and quick to gain traction (everyone’s got a favorite IVR-flaw story). Unfortunately, many people don’t take into account the type of device being used by the caller or the environment they are calling from. In general, IVR systems work very well when they are properly designed. With that being said, here are a few examples of devices and environments that are not well suited for IVR use. Enjoy.

Selecting your IVR host is like buying a car

Often times when you set out to buy that shiny new or used car, things don’t go exactly as planned.  In the same way, finding the right IVR hosting partner can be a tricky business.  Like buying a car, if you walk into the IVR world without doing your research, you could get a lemon. It’s very important to understand some of the tricks that some IVR vendors use to get you to BUY NOW. Don’t get me wrong, not all IVR hosts are unscrupulous and not all are trying to take you to the cleaners. In fact, among all the hosts, many are really trustworthy. With that being said, the potential for a rip-off is still ever present. Some of the practices I have seen over the last eight years in this business justify some of the suspicions people have when it comes to IVR.

If you catch a whiff of any of the practices below, it would be wise to be on the alert. Armed with a little IVR knowledge, you should be able to detect and avoid some common pitfalls.

Here are a few car dealer tricks that are applicable to the IVR hosting world.

Trade In Value:
Auto Industry: People are attached to their old cars and often times they are set on getting a good deal on the trade-in.  The car dealer will take your beater but then they will inflate either the monthly payments or the down payment. Let’s be honest, your cherry red Fiero (The Red Dragon) wasn’t very cool in 1989, let alone 2009! I know how hard it is to say goodbye…my 84 Rabbit still haunts me to this day.

IVR Industry:  Old IVR applications are often pretty beat up (poor VUI design, not VXML compliant, the voice recordings sound like they were recorded in a Dr. Pepper can, etc.) Customers feel attached to these old systems because they paid a lot of money to have them built or even built the apps themselves.  Many IVR hosts don’t provide professional services and aren’t interested in improving the performance of your application.

MTI: Despite a recent program introduced in the Auto industry, we are not going to give you $3500 bucks because your current IVR system is a gas-guzzling road hog. What we will do is provide you with our expert VUI design and professional services team with over 20+ years of experience in the industry. If your old application is great and it is VXML compliant, by all means bring it over and run it on our platform. If it’s not so great, our professional services team will work with your team to design a system that meets all of your needs. MTI has two models:

1. We turnkey the whole process and build the apps for you.

2. We allow our partners to build their own applications and host them on our platform.

Upgrades and extras:
Auto Industry:  Car mats, Upgraded Stereo Equipment, License Plate Holders, Paint and Fabric protectors, Navigation, Kitty Litter box, etc. The list goes on and on, but in the end the unlucky consumer ends up a few thousand over budget.

IVR Industry:  Scalability, ASR and TTS resources are a few of the add-ons that will quickly blow any budget. Many hosts will charge per-use fees for features that should be included with your base service. Some “low-cost” hosts charge more for enterprise grade technology but they will allow you to use the in-house ASR or TTS for a lower price. Don’t settle for inferior technology or service.

MTI: Any enterprises interested in IVR should choose a hosting provider that is driven by performance and doesn’t nickel and dime you for basic services. MTI strives to become a true partner. We know it is in our best interest to create lasting relationships with our customers. We provide fair pricing that is easy to understand. It is our philosophy that customers deserve best-of-breed technology with full redundancy and automated failover, a 24/7 Network Operations Center, a disaster recovery plan, and the scalability to absorb spikes in call volume. Did I mention that your IVR host should be standards-based (VXML 2.0 2.1, SIP, etc)? You wouldn’t buy a car that some guy pieced together from some parts he found at the junkyard, would you?

Bait And Switch (We’re giving away cars, it’s FREE, blowout sale, 12 months same as cash):
Auto Industry:  We’ve all seen the meathead on TV urging you to come down to the dealership and take advantage of X promotion. You’re bored and you like free stuff so you head down to the dealer to pick up your FREE car but you leave the lot with $40,000 of debt.

IVR Industry:  Cars aren’t free, neither is IVR. You may be able to sign up for free or you may be able to download a fancy platform that you can run in your basement, but just remember: you get what you pay for.

Once you go for the bait, they set the hook. In the beginning you have this great little platform that takes ten calls a day and you don’t have any problems. Here is where they get you - when it comes time to deploy the application with real call volume, you suddenly realize that your free IVR platform does not scale, is not very reliable, and your monthly invoice goes from $39.95 to $3995.00. How did this happen? Well…when you signed up for your free or cheap account, you didn’t notice that those add-on fees and the per-port or per-minute rates were ridiculously high. These platforms are great for developers, not for enterprises. I could go on and on about this one, the bottom line is – be careful.

MTI: We allow prospective customers to fully test their applications in our sandbox environment before they sign a service agreement. No hidden fees or tricks. Before you decide to become a customer of MTI, you will have a clear understanding of how the billing works and, if you know your call volumes, then you will have a good idea of your monthly invoice.

Bottom line: If you are shopping for IVR, know your facts and know what you are looking for. If that is developing a partnership with a company that offers a great platform with exemplary service, you should give us a call.

If you’re not careful when you choose your host, you may end up with Sal the IVR guy with his pinky ring and Velcro shoes.

Over-thinking the Cloud

Many of you have probably spent a few days or possibly even a few weeks recently, lying on your back staring at the sky. With any luck there was just a sea of never ending blueness that made you relaxed and happy to be at the beach/pool/lake/mountain top or wherever your vacation dreams reside. However I suspect that during this period of unrelenting bliss, a few clouds showed up that made you think about the future of networking computing…unless that was just me..

With all the talk of cloud computing, when you actually look at clouds you will notice that the typical cloud that is used to depict the “Cloud” is usually a sizeable puffy one, fairly neatly formed and oval-ish. However, when you look at real clouds you will notice that clouds vary as much as people. No two clouds are alike. They all exhibit different personalities and traits.

During our relaxed state, the most welcome form of high-level cloud is not puffy at all, in fact, known as “Cirrus” clouds they are usually very thin and often wispy. Typically found at heights greater than 20,000 feet Cirrus clouds are composed of ice crystals that originate from the freezing of super-cooled water droplets (I looked that up…). What we like about Cirrus clouds is that they generally occur in fair weather and don’t threaten to disturb our dreamy state of relaxation.

Those large,  puffy “Internet” clouds, also known as Cumulus (yep…the ones that start to look like rabbits and puppies after we stare at them for a while) tend to be mid to low level clouds that turn a gray color when they become “Cumulonimbus”. This is because they are reaching their capacity and are expected to be overloaded soon. The sight of a large looming cumulonimbus will motivate us to start rolling up the beach towel and head to the hotel for an early happy hour. However, their slightly less impressive half-brothers “Stratocumulus” that generally appear as a low, lumpy layer of clouds with breaks of clear sky in between generally make us hold off on the exit strategy but do have a tendency to ruin the mood. As you can see the Cloud world is very rich and diverse.

So, what is the point of all this? Well, as more and more companies talk about their “Cloud” computing strategy, I think we should be asking ourselves exactly what type of cloud they are building and is the term “Cloud” really meaningful as the Internet develops.  Is their cloud something that is large and looming that, as it grows, will eventually ruin our day, or something simple and un-intrusive that is far away and not likely to have a big impact at all on our lives? It’s actually probably neither.

Unfortunately, as someone who starts to pace relentlessly when he loses Blackberry connectivity for even 5 minutes, I think we really need to develop an all-encompassing analogy that depicts something that will entirely envelop us and completely change the way we think about computing, the web, the phone, networks, technology, vacations, clouds and everything else.

I propose that network diagrams should no longer show the Internet as a “Cloud” off in the corner with lines coming out of it -  they should start with a musty gray undeterminable background with all the stuff sitting right in the middle of the grayness, connecting not by clear lines, but via some ethereal mist-like form. I further suggest we no-longer use the term “Cloud” computing, but start using “Fog” computing. Simple, brutal, cold and in your face.

That way we will be much more honest with the public at large and all the confusion will be completely eliminated.

Cashing in on people with FAT FINGERS

In the IVR world we all know what a fat finger is. Just in case you haven’t heard the term before, it works like this: A caller dials a telephone number like 1-800-MYBANK1 to check their balance but they optical amplifier fat finger the number and accidentally dial 1-800-MYBANK2. Instead of checking his balance, the caller is now talking to some guy trying to sell him a timeshare on the Jersey shore.

The term fat finger actually has nothing to do with the size of your index finger, but is basically a typo while using the telephone keypad. Oh I know, it’s probably not politically correct these days to use the term fat finger, so for the remainder of this blog I’ll try to clean it up and use terms such as differently weighted digit and massive dactyl.

Thanks to the geniuses running American Idol, massive dactyl will soon be more popular than bling amongst 13-22 year olds. Here’s why: American Idol decided to increase the number of finalists this year from 12 to 13. American IDOL only owns the sequence 1-866-IDOLS-01 through 1-866-IDOLS-12. Here is the problem: when Johnny calls to vote for his favorite singer (the 13th to appear) he doesn’t get to vote, but he does get to chat with a nice young lady that for a minimal fee of $15.00 per minute will gladly talk to him for the next few hours.

Shame on the telco team at American Idol. Most companies purchase banks of toll free numbers from the carriers and someone at AI should have shelled out the extra $50 bucks for fifty numbers instead of 12.

Shame on the carrier, c’mon you’ve got to know that a ton of people are going to accidentally dial the wrong number. Someone in the chain should have been smart enough to know that having a few extra sequential numbers and the commonly mis-dialed numbers would be a good idea. Given the current economic situation, a lot of parents are going to be very upset at the end of the month when they find out that Johnny’s American Idol vote cost them the mortgage payment.

There is a lot of blame to go around for this monumental oversight but rest assured that some goofball is sitting in his basement watching the calls come in and planning his retirement.

MTI at Nuance Conversations 2008

Sun and Speech, Conversations 2008 is underway at the Rosen Shingle Creek resort in Orlando.  MTI is exhibiting in the “Solutions Showcase” area so if you are attending the conference this year, stop by and say hello.  In addition to meeting some really charming folks at our pod,  you can also find out how we plan to save the economy 1,000,000 minutes at a time…ahem.

Auto Dialing Business Card

I wanted to take a moment to highlight an unique use of DTMF tones. In the IVR world, we are all familiar with the MF tones that make the magic happen within our applications. Here at MTI we are big proponents of speech recognition technology but like it or not, we realize that touchtones are here to stay for the foreseeable future. Being the weekend tinkerer that I am, I ran across an article last weekend on one of my favorite websites instructables.com. Instructables operates on the theory that the more people realize they can create their own stuff, the less likely they will be to squander our increasingly scarce resources on “cheap” stuff .

The concept of the card is pretty simple, embed a small micro controller that plays a series of preprogrammed DTMF tones. When the business card is tapped against the mouthpiece of the phone, the DTMF tones are played and the user is connected to the telephone number without dialing. If you are handy with a soldering iron you can find complete instructions here

Below is a video of the card in action. The audio is a little faint, but you get the concept.