Voice. An Opinion.

Shai Berger from Fonolo gave a very entertaining talk at eComm about their new service being launched later this year. What they do is (to me) pretty wacky: they “spider” the phone system. In an analogous way to how web spiders crawl websites to assemble linklists, Fonolo’s “crawls” the IVR systems of some of the world’s leading companies.

That’s right - they actually dial them and navigate the system, using a mixture of automated dialling, speech recognition, DTMF and recording, followed by some “post production” analysis in certain cases by human beings.

The result?

They create a map of what they call “phonespace” - in effect a map of the IVR nooks and crannies of (say) American Airlines, or Amex, or other mainstream Fortune 500 companies that have a high touch-rate with consumers over the phone.

Having built the map of phonespace, what can I do with it? Well, if you’ve ever wanted to skip the pre-amble propaganda advertisement that often greets you when you arrive at someone’s IVR system (”Welcome toMegaCorp, the home of the fluffiest widgets in the world, with our new Fall Season Lemur widgets now available!”) while you’re thinking, “I just want to cancel my order!!”, and get straight to the section you’re interested in , then Fonolo may be for you.

Having registered with Fonolo, you select the section of the target IVR you seek (say, change of address), and wait. Fonolo triggers a call to the target IVR, navigates to the relevant section on your behalf, and then calls you when it’s arrived at that section. You just wait for the call, then carry on once Fonolo connects you. They call this “deep dialling” - in effect - going straight to the section that you want within a labryinthine IVR system - and it’s a very interesting idea.

And that’s not all. It also creates a call history of all the calls you make, so that you end up with a record of all the calls you made, when you made them, what section you called, and so on. And even better, it records the calls so that you have a permanent record of the interaction! I can think of several customer service experiences where I would loved to have had a recording of the call. I suspect you can too.

All in all - pretty wacky, and I like it. I do worry about several things with regard to this service

• Being able to cover enough of the relevant target destinations for people (mapping enough terrain)
• Keeping the map of phonespace up to date (there’s likely to be regular changes to IVRs, or even deliberate changes when and if the company detects it’s being spidered and decides to “fight back”)

Despite these potential issues, I really like the idea, and am keen to give it a try when the beta is open to the public. I’ll report back once I’ve taken the tour.