Thoughts on launching a movement

Elaborating on my post of yesterday regarding the troubled waters Gethuman is navigating, I think the key to building a reform movement that will take hold and have a concrete and lasting positive impact is to assemble the right alliances from stakeholders who have a vested interest in pressuring businesses to invest in customer-centric solutions.

If you look back at all progress say in product safety that has been made, in almost every case, it has been a battle between on the one hand businesses that want to protect their short term interests and their margins by resisting anything that leads to production cost increases, and on the other consumers and their advocates who moved to pressure them to build safer products.

The classic example being of course the car seat belt and Ralph Nader's crusade for automotive safety. Initially, there was great resistance to the seat belt, but eventually, companies realized that safety was a competitive advantage they could exploit (and did). And that turned out to be great not only for the companies who went the safety route, but for the automotive industry in general because it opened up a whole new market and new set of customers (safety conscious Moms) who had up to then been excluded.

The stakeholders in our case are consumers and their advocates, VUI designers (we want to have jobs and make money), companies that deploy IVR solutions (they want to build applications that will be adopted have a truly positive impact for their clients), integrators, companies that host the deployments, and companies that buy them and deploy them (our customers).

The challenge in our situation, I believe, is that the ultimate user is not the technology buyer, so, obviously, the interest of the buyer is not aligned with that of the consumer.

A strategy for moving forward, in my view, would look something like this:

(1) Educate consumer groups on the shabby state of deployed automation and support. That shouldn't be too hard given the universal dislike of currently deployed IVR systems.

(2) Educate consumer groups on the possibilities of the technology: they need to understand that a great deal of consumer pain can be alleviated if businesses invested in the deployment of quality speech solutions.

(3) Have consumer advocates pick one or two key features that can be delivered and that are most wanted by the consumer and agitate for their adoption. For example: telling the caller how long they need to wait when they are placed on hold, or never having the caller repeat information they give the agent.

(4) The features in (3) need to be (a) easily implementable (technology exists and it is not too expensive), and (b) easily monitor-able.

(5) Have the consumer groups establish watchdog units that will monitor and mobilize when the key feature in (3) is absent from an application.

(6) Enlist legislators that will serve as a Democles Sword. Nothing mobilizes an industry to do the right thing than the threat of legislated regulation.

(7) Build capacity: i.e., make sure that the supply of VUI designers meets the demand for them.

(8) Once the structures are in place for transferring best practices into actual deployments (after the initial strategic insinuation in mobilizing for (3)) and the investments needed to deploy quality solutions are systematically made, quality of deployments has no
way to go but up.

Gethuman in this scheme could fulfill the role of consumer advocate. They would be the agitators making demands for better solutions from companies that deploy IVR contact center applications. For this to be taken seriously, though, Gethuman would need to tone down its "bypass the IVR" gimick and make demanding better automation its central demand rather than doing away with automation....

Establishing a consortium of some sort that speaks on behalf of businesses that deploy IVR solutions would be a concrete first step to take.