Say or Press 1 – A happy hybrid or a problematic pairing?
Common Sense Tip of the Day: It seems simple to blend speech and DTMF functionality in your contact center applications, but from a caller’s perspective, using “say or press” usually raises more problems than it solves. While flexible navigation and mobile phones make speech more constructive and quite enticing, accuracy and security make DTMF more […]
Recording phone calls
Common Sense Tip of the Day: Your call may be monitored or recorded. This statement has been true since before the telephone started ringing. Moments after the telegraph was invented in the mid-1800s, so too was “wiretapping”. Not until 1968 did the US Congress pass laws which restricted the use of wiretapping. But today general […]
Customer Service
Common Sense Tip of the Day: It’s time to put the “service” back in “Customer Service”. The idea of what makes service to the customer superior has changed over time. First, it was the simple act of answering the phone. If you picked up…success! Your customer was in fact satisfied. Then it was using the […]
Rephrasing for success
Common Sense Tip of the Day: Are you asking the right questions, in the best UI, and in the right way? Questions can be a useful component of your applications, but they do need to be posed carefully for the greatest success. As our audiences have become more comfortable using speech, it’s sometimes their first […]
Hosting options, made simple
Common Sense Tip of the Day: It seems like everything’s moving off-premise. Hosted options are so affordable, and many hosting companies are offering really useful online tools to evaluate and manage your application. Makes perfect sense! The task seems daunting, but we can help keep that migration simple, and will be happy to work with […]
Improving vs. Reinventing the wheel
“The Customer Experience.” “We have a renewed focus on the customer’s interaction.” “We’ve changed everything to put the focus back on the customers.” “We just hired someone with this bold new idea: make your customer happy.” Really? We may live in a time warp, but we don’t think the target ever moved. Some limitations may […]
Time for some changes?
It’s the new year, and that inevitably brings with it change. Now’s a great time to review your contact center scripts and/or audio. Odds are there’s an old contact, different department name or expired email address lurking in there somewhere. Are you doing business in new countries? You might need some international recordings to ensure […]
Please listen carefully
When you find yourself compelled to add a line such as “Please listen carefully before selecting from the following three options” to your verbiage, stop and ask yourself why? Is it because you feel your callers instinctively ask for a representative, rather than try to use the automated system? Perhaps they’re confused by the language […]
Cleaning the error recovery mess
Life is messy. It doesn’t matter if you’re thinking about your home, your car, your family, or even your work. Most of the time, processes need tweaking and mistakes will happen. Take your automated applications, for example. If customers could enter long account numbers flawlessly and always selected the right option, you’d never even need […]
Not So Ordinary
The ABC show ‘No Ordinary Family’ was about an ordinary family that gained special abilities. One of them even fights crime with his new powers. The family, however, is hesitant to tell the world of their differences for fear that the world will look at them differently, so they ‘blend in.’ Has your company taken […]