Putting up with Bad Interfaces

A thought I want to jot down and elaborate on in future posts.

Why do people have such low tolerance for bad usability in the IVR but are (or have been) able to endure without a peep of complaint the DOS and UNIX prompt? I don't ever remember anyone saying, "stupid computer! Why can't you understand me when I type 'check disk' instead of stubbornly insisting on 'chkdsk'. " Instead, people usually curse their own "stupidity" and "carelessness," and exclaim how they are just bad with computers and how their 10 year old child was far better than them, and all that.

So, why is that?

One reason, I guess, is the perception that humans have that whatever a human can do, the brainy machine should be able to do faster and better. A human can understand speech and engage in conversations with almost no effort (or so we think), and if a computer can't do it, then clearly there is something wrong with that computer (or, in this case, the IVR technology).

The perception is exacerbated by the illusion well designed VUIs give of sounding and behaving like a human. Which results in a raising of intelligence expectations and a lowering of tolerance for mistakes.

Sometimes I wonder if a VUI that was designed like a DOS command would result in people complaining less than otherwise! Would a VUI that sounded like a robot (but was perfectly intelligible), that tolerated no variations, that sounded like the almighty Computer itself speaking, without a hint of negotiating, who was in complete and unshakable control, that didn't fret or apologize when it made a mistake, that accused the user of making errors when things failed, that responded with things like, "Your response is not recognized as an internal or external command" -- would such a VUI have the effect of having people blame themselves when things didn't work? An experiment worth conducting....

New Study By VocaLabs

An important study was just published by VocaLabs, a consulting firm that specializes in call center customer feedback.

The report, authored by Peter Leppik, finds that:

The top three things customers associate with good customer service can be summarized as "make it quick and easy to reach a person, and make that person polite and professional." 50% of survey respondents selected all three of the top three factors.

Among the top items on customers' wish list are the ability to reach agents easily, politeness and courtesy of agents, short wait times, and the having one's problem on the first call.

Read the rest at: http://www.vocalabs.com/resources/newsletter/newsletter37.html

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.

Gethuman in trouble....

A piece in Businessweek discusses how and why the gethuman project has not lived up to the revolutionary promises it made when it was launched in late 2005.

What happened? English learned that no matter how effective online consumer crowds may be, full-blown change still takes the passion and energy of committed individuals. "If you're going to try to do a standard," he says, "you need someone who is really going to drive it." English admits his busy schedule as chief technology officer of fast-growing travel search engine Kayak.com played a part in the slowdown, but he never intended the site to take up much of his time in the first place: "I wanted the citizens of the Web to run this."

Leading a movement is a thankless task that requires a great deal of passion and selfless sacrifice.

I suspect that Microsoft and Nuance pulled one of the oldest tricks that establishments pull when they need to neutralize an agitator: flatter them and pretend to join them.

Also: I think the main reason that English lost steam is that he had no strategy for reform: he agitated and that was that.

Agitating is useful and necessary. But reform requires a long-term program with the patient building of allies and the steady shaping of opinion.

But I don't think his efforts have been in vain at all. The movement truly needs to be picked up from within the industries that deploy Speech IVR solutions with bridges to consumer watch dogs to put steady pressure on companies to invest in the deployment of quality speech solutions.

Measuring satisfaction

I've always felt that post-call customer surveys are methodologically unsound -- or at least as sound as the online poll surveys. The people who bother to take the surveys are self-selecting, and chances are that the people who respond were really happy about the service and were moved enough to trouble themselves with hanging on and providing their feedback, or -- which is more likely -- were really pissed and needed to vent off their frustration.

But there is another layer still that makes these surveys suspect: agent interference. That is, agents selecting which callers to nudge to the survey, and when nudging, trying to influence them to give them good marks.

Check out this article from Service Untitled. It talks about agents "begging" callers to give them good marks!

Such surveys can still be useful if used, for instance, to identify which calls to listen to for training purposes (listen to the ones that got real bad or real good marks). They can also be used to route callers to manager in case the marks entered are really bad, etc.