Voice. An Opinion.

Ok, belatedly. Right after Fonolo presented at eComm, we had in many ways a riposte from Simonie Wilson. She’s a Speech Scientist at Intervoice and specialises in VUI (Voice User Interface) design. Her talk was excellent, and was peppered with very practical advice and observations about how to get your VUI right, as well as great examples of VUI-gone-bad.

Among the points she made:

• Often people don’t want to speak to a human being (for example, they are often put off by call centres in far-away places, or having to share person details with a person, when they’d rather they were processed directly by a machine). This alone is a great observation, and a good counter-point to the general assumption that everyone who enters an IVR tree is trying to get to a human (GetHuman being the exemplar site for the latter of course). For example, much of the popularity of SMS is due to the fact that often, people don’t want to talk to each other, but they do want to communicate.
• Humour can be your friend in VUI. She gave some great examples of how humour can be used to lighten the VUI experience, and to relax and engage the caller. For example detecting silences, and prompting with “Hellooooo - anyone out there?”, or offering jovial menu options such as “Press 3 to hear our ducks quack” (where pressing three does exactly that - plays some nice duck-quack noises). I think this is often underestimated. We’re all used to the standard “out of a box” IVR system, which tends to infuriate us from the get-go by stating that “your call is important to us” (you’re thinking - “Really? Is it?” - and the battle is already being lost) followed often by a loooooong company announcement (”Dial2Do welcomes you to the longest company description ever! We’d like to take a few moments to …….”), while you’re now thinking something like “MUST. KILL. PHONE SYSTEM. HATE. ALL. IVR!!!! ARRRRRGGGHH!”. And so on.
• She also made the point that companies often just “slap on” some IVR / VUI stuff as an after-thought. They’ll spend millions on their web presence for example, and then undo much of their good image and perception work by being mean on one of their most important touchpoints; the phone. Doing so is a great way to allow existing or potential customers to self-serve themselves some “bad” service and bad brand experience. The system just sits there gradually eroding the other marketing dollars you’re spending elsewhere.

Her foils are pretty concise - I’d recommend grabbing the audio or video when it’s up there on the eComm site.