We are thrilled to say our own Customer Experience Platform won bronze in the Innovation in Customer Service category in the sixth annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. It’s no secret that enabling our enterprise customers to provide their end-users with a memorable customer experience is a big passion of ours. The Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service are one of the world’s top sales awards, contact center awards, and customer service awards and this recognition reemphasizes our commitment to provide quality solutions that improve customer satisfaction.

Outside of our customer engagement platform, our social media solutions have also received some notable industry nods. Our own Voice for Chatter also received the Product of the Year award from INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine.  Angel’s Voice for Chatter is a cloud-based, free application which brings IVR technology to Salesforce.com’s social media tool that looks to “empower employees and make business processes social.”  With voice functionality on Chatter, employees can be more productive and easily share information by leaving a voice update on their Chatter feeds via a link to the audio recording as well as a transcribed text version of the voice update.

Additionally, Angel’s VoiceforTwitter was selected as a finalist in the 2012 Appy Awards’ social networking category.  Our VoiceforTwitter has had an exciting year since starting off in President Obama’s Twitter 2011 Town Hall Meeting and enables Twitter users to deepen their social media experience and connect with other members using both text and voice.

As we approach the midway mark to 2012, we remain committed to creating new and innovative services and solutions across Web and mobile platforms to ensure our enterprise customers can not only remain as efficient and productive as possible, but also have the best tools on hand in order to create a personalized experience for their customers. Needless to say, we’re excited to share what’s in store from us in the second half of 2012!

New Internet-only radio stations, operating on a shoestring budget, pose a credible threat as they steadily erode market share from the bigger, more established radio stations by creating new micro-content niches. Established AM/FM broadcast stations are, in-turn, leveraging the Internet as a complementary channel to reach a much wider, Internet-savvy audience.

Facebook, Twitter and other social networks compete with more traditional media such as newspapers, TV and radio stations, for audience attention and advertising dollars. On the other hand, they provide a conduit for traditional media to reach a global audience that was hitherto inaccessible.

This disruptive techno-climate calls for radio stations and other traditional media to innovate, change, and adopt a more radical strategy – one that embraces technology.

A recent innovation in this space is a service from Angel called Voice For Facebook. Radio stations in the U.S. are leveraging Voice for Facebook, to better engage with their listeners using the communication medium of choice, namely, voice.

In this blog post, I will provide answers to some of the common questions I get about this service:

What is Voice for Facebook?

Voice for Facebook is a service that lets radio stations engage their listeners on their Facebook page using voice.  The service is as simple to use, as it is to set up.

How can my listener community and I use Voice for Facebook? 

You and your listener community can post voice comments to your Facebook page. To do so, simply pick up a telephone and place a call to a Voice for Facebook provided phone number. Once connected, you can speak a voice message into the phone that will get posted on your Facebook page. Yes, it’s really that simple!

How does it work?

When you (a radio station employee) sign up for Voice for Facebook, our service will provide you with a unique phone number. You can advertise this number any way you choose – on your Facebook page, announce it during your programs or publish it on your website. Your listeners can then call into this number and start using it to post voice comments!

So what’s the big deal?

If you air talk shows or play music, you probably have listener call-in lines. Do your lines get inundated with calls during your show? How many of your callers hang up because your lines are busy?

Are your most popular shows engaging your listeners outside the program window? What if your callers could call in at any time and post voice comments that get listened to and ‘liked’ on your Facebook page? Would that bring them back to your shows and page more often? Would your Facebook fans love listening to audio comments?

Do you have callers who would rather leave a well-rehearsed comment on your Facebook page rather than suffer from “phone-fright” when they are live on-air?

In combining a communication channel, easily accessible on the go, with Facebook – a network that is widely accessible, engaging, social – and voice, a medium rich in emotive content, Voice for Facebook provides you with a new social engagement tool that can be harnessed in so many different ways, limited only by your creativity!

How are other radio stations using Voice for Facebook?

Radio stations are using Voice for Facebook in so many different ways. Here are a few examples:

• To post exciting audio announcements, promoting their upcoming programs
• To post audio advertisements for their sponsors and underwriters
• To engage their listener community on Facebook by posting interesting audio questions and comments and soliciting responses
• To be used as a 24/7 call-in line where users can post questions outside the program window
• To enable listeners to call in and make song requests or post comments that they can play back on their show

Great, but how much do you charge?

Our service is currently absolutely free! We won’t charge you for set-up. We won’t charge you for the telephone number. We won’t charge you for your usage minutes.

Okay, What am I missing? This is too good to be true…

Yes, we are giving it away. We hope your participation will help us better understand the market to build great products in the future.

What are my next steps?

To register, simply go to www.voice.com, and click on the button that says “Get Started.” Follow the registration steps and you will be up and running in less than a minute!

But what if we step back a few years and consider the phone? With the rise of smartphones globally, it’s safe to say that the phone as a means of interaction is not going anywhere. So why have the consumer’s interactions with most businesses largely not changed over the past 30 years? Why is it that when I’m traveling, my Internet browser can recognize my current zip code but when I call certain companies they still have to ask me for my phone number? Maybe it’s time for IVRs and call centers to step up and make similar improvements by leveraging the information they have on me, a customer,—like an account ID that is tied to a certain phone number or a recent order that was placed—to provide all of their customers better and faster service.

The future of customer service includes incorporating trends that leverage consumer data, social media, and increased use of mobile technologies such as smartphones. Organizations have a huge task in front of them of combining these initiatives to create 360 degrees of customer service and erasing the past 30 years of the bad technology associated with their old IVR and call center technologies.

It is important to remember that to complete the 360 degrees of various touch points to your customers, you must incorporate your customers’ connections with partnering organizations. This additional customer touch point should be considered, but seems too frequently forgotten, and focuses on how your partners are treating and delivering services to your customers. For example, it is fairly common for companies to develop partnerships and to utilize others’ services to fulfill certain client needs or business goals. Making efforts to work with partnering companies to provide a seamless customer experience across all levels is a vital piece often left untouched.

As an example, Company A is a retail clothing and shoe store and has a partnership with Company B for shoe sales only. A member of Company A’s loyalty program calls to place an order for shoes; in an automated system, she selects the shoe department, then women’s boots, and identifies herself as a loyalty program member. However, when the customer finally reaches the final step of placing the specific order with Company B, the agent has no information on the caller and her selections, forcing her to repeat herself. Company A is responsible for creating a more seamless transition for the customer so she does not have to provide the same information more than once in a single interaction.

Let us know what you think. How well do you feel you are being serviced by the companies you interact with?

Interestingly, I can directly correlate this with my interactions during design and assessment engagements. Once the “Why” is identified, it becomes relatively easy to design a new system and to judge if the existing system is actually successful or needs improvement, and if so, where specifically.

Every business is unique, so using the same set of performance indicators across the board to measure “success” does not make sense. The response for “Why we do this” could be different across companies, even for the same service or product. Hence, branding a customer engagement management (CEM) solution as unsuccessful, just because, say, one of its indicators is lower than the industry standards, would not be correct either. Understanding the program success criteria is important to drive the specific IVR performance metrics.

Let’s consider a few scenarios:

1. Correct User Identification Solution: Company A is a high net worth personal finance management firm that emphasizes that “personal touch,” where routing every call to the right agent is important. In that case, performance indictors like self-serviced/automation rate or containment (calls that do not reach a live agent) should not be your success criteria. For your business, having mechanisms in place to correctly identify the user, proactively recognize the call reason, with the least amount of user input, within the shortest possible duration is a good success metric.
2. Action-Oriented Solutions: Company B has a pharmacy prescription reminder service. Now the success metrics may not necessary be containment. It is the conversion rate. Insight into the number of times customers reorder within that IVR is an important metric. Whether the business has a live agent or a self-service piece for reordering, revenue contribution from this specific channel is a good metric to judge overall program success.

The “Why” helps designers understand the goal of the solution. The more information designers have about the short-term and long-term business goals, the better aligned the solution will be and the more value businesses can get for their investment. Once the “Why” is determined, creating and mapping tasks and subtasks that lead to that goal drives the design.

Balancing between resource requirements, the pace of overall service, cross-selling opportunities, the level of self-service provided, and costs is then driven by business-specific goals. If you were to formulate an answer to the “Why” question, what would it be? Do you think it would affect how you approach your CEM’s design and success?

It has been over 15 years since those days, and I am proud to say that I get that response a lot less often. And, I am proud to say I STILL work in the IVR industry. The technology and its acceptance have come a long way, perhaps in part as a result of better and smarter technology.

Years ago, I saw an episode of Seinfeld in which Kramer somehow managed to have the “movie phone number” pointed to his phone. He was answering calls and trying to inform people what movies were playing, at what time, and at which theater. When he realized he could not identify the touch tones, he decided to ask the caller, “Why don’t you just tell me the name of the movie you’d like to see?” While making for a funny scene, when I think back on that episode, it reminds me of a couple things. First, the ability to call an IVR system in order to find out what movies are playing, as well as the time and location, is pretty cool! AND, with IVRs today, we really can have the caller simply tell the system what movie they would like to see!

In addition to new and different applications, the technology that can be used in conjunction with an IVR system makes the use of these systems more and more popular every day—technology such as speech recognition, voice biometrics, integration with social media, mobile applications, GPS applications, and the list goes on and on!

Callers are not the only ones warming up to IVRs—more and more businesses are utilizing IVR technology and finding more creative uses for it. Entire industries that would not have dared to dream of having their beloved clients talk to a machine are now more apt to at least give callers the option of getting what they want or need from an IVR. Of course, they still want to offer the ability to speak to a live person. And that is just fine! There are certainly instances in which it makes perfect sense to talk to a person.

Even better, not only are businesses more at ease with allowing their clients to use an IVR, but many are also more comfortable with newer technology and ways to deploy the systems. No longer do businesses need to invest tens, even hundreds, of thousands of dollars in on-premise IVR equipment. Nor do they need to pay exorbitant fees and wait months or years to have an application up and running. Now through cloud technology and advanced development tools, they can have an application set to go live in a matter of days and can simply pay as they go to flatten their costs.

I love the fact that IVRs have become more advanced, more interactive, and especially more accepted, but how do you feel about them? Do you still prefer waiting on hold to talk to a person or is interacting with an IVR to get the information you want with a few voice commands (or touch tones—for you old schoolers) becoming your first line of attack? Let us know in the comments below!

Where would web designers and marketers be without Web analytics? They would be completely in the dark – making design decisions based on speculation and the feedback of a handful of users.

Where are voice user interface (VUI) designers without phone analytics? They’re pretty much in the same boat as their web counterparts. Sure, there are known best practices for VUI design that can be taken into consideration, but you may never really know the type of people that will be calling your application and the types of issues they’re having trying to get done what they want done. Until you can take a bunch of calls over a period of time and identify the metrics that tell you where the users are having issues, or where they’re being successful, chances are that your callers will have a poor experience.

Where does one start with phone analytics? Fortunately, there are many parallels to web analytics and should feel familiar. On Angel’s platform, where a functional node of the IVR is referred to as a Voice Page and the collection of those pages is a Voice Site, it makes things a little easier to relate.

For the uninitiated, here’s a few of the metrics I find to be the most useful and examples of how the web and phone metrics relate.

1. Measuring the customers who just give up – Exit and Hang Up Rate: 

Web: The exit rate denotes the percentage of visitors who exited a site from a specific page, rather than, say, continuing to fill out a contact form, however, some exit points may indicate that people had trouble finding what they needed.

Phone: If the section of the application the caller hung up in is not a designated section where a caller should hang up, for example after a confirmation, there’s a relatively high probability that the caller was having an issue in the particular section where they hung up.

2. Hitting the hot spots – Web Page Views and Voice Page Hits:

Web: Page Views tell us the how frequently a web page is visited, which tells marketers that the web page is a popular spot or it could also mean that you’re sending users to a place unintentionally.

Phone: Voice Page Hits tell us the sections of the IVR that are the most popular. It could also reveal issues in the application, especially if it’s a section of the application that’s not supposed to be hit often or only in error.

3. Time after time – Average Time on (Web) page and Average Time on (Voice) page:

Web: Depending on the content, the average time spent on a Web page tells us if the user is interested in what’s on the page, like if there is something to read.  It can also tell us if the page is confusing or malfunctioning if the purpose of that page is to perform a quick operation and continue on to another page.

Phone: If the purpose of the phone call is to get something done or to make a selection to get to a place to get something done, that shouldn’t take a lot of time. If the duration seems longer than it should, there’s likely an issue.

4. Getting things done – Goals and Task Analysis:

Web: In web analytics and specifically, Google Analytics, goals can be set for measuring a process, like completing a sale or a subscription process.

Phone: On the phone, especially if the purpose of the application is to automate a task that would otherwise be handled by a live agent, it’s crucial to identify those tasks and measure the completion rates.  For those tasks that were not successful, it is also important to identify where in the process callers were having the most trouble.

Here are a few more examples:

Hopefully these examples brought a few things to light when it comes to the types of metrics used for analyzing a phone application. Taking a little time to analyze IVR metrics and making the appropriate changes to IVR and continually repeating that process will delight your customers and help you retain them. It can also lead to a lot of cost savings, especially for large volume applications

“Good enough customer service just no longer cuts it for retailers,” said Don Keane, Vice President of Marketing at Angel. “Retailers are struggling to differentiate themselves in an increasingly competitive market, all while trying to keep costs low. Creating a customer experience strategy that focuses on multiple channels is imperative to helping retailers customize each customer interaction and build stronger brand loyalty.”

Angel anticipates the following trends will be top priorities for retailers at NRF 2012:

• Analytics – As retailers look to enhance the customer experience while reducing costs, having on-demand analytics and background insight on past customer purchases and interactions can enable retailers to create a personalized customer interaction strategy.

• Location services – Emerging location-based services are giving retailers the ability to efficiently direct inbound calls based on location to the appropriate resource within the business as well as quickly help customers locate a retail store, ensuring the customer receives targeted services.

• Security – With retailers communicating with their customers on different channels, data and transaction security continues to remain a major focus and a key component to building trust and loyalty with the customer base.

Angel works with 40 retail companies, including 10 of the top 100 U.S. retailers, and will demonstrate how retailers can build enterprise-wide strategies around these trends and leverage cloud-based customer experience management tools to efficiently manage the entire life cycle of any customer interaction on the phone, regardless of the channel.

To understand NLP, it’s important to understand how automatic speech recognition (ASR) works. The way I generally explain it is that it’s very similar to your understanding of foreign languages. When we learn a foreign language, we build a list of words we can understand. These words or phrases in the ASR system are called grammars. If you speak anything outside that list, ASR system doesn’t understand what you are saying. Based on some research done in the IVR industry, the average rate at which callers say things that are not on the list of pre-defined IVR grammars varies from 15–30%. Assuming 95% accuracy in understanding grammar-driven words, our current IVRs can only understand around 70 percent of total caller interaction.

One way to reduce this out-of-list grammar problem is to introduce more comprehensive lists of words and phrases but this process is expensive and time consuming and, in the end, you can do only so much. A true natural language–based solution solves these problems as it works by building a statistical model using machine learning with the goal of understanding the caller’s intent rather than matching a set of words. Let’s take an example: you are interacting with an IVR and you have to enter a four-digit PIN; you say something like, “One, two, five, four—not five, four—three, four.” It would be pretty hard for an IVR to understand but NLP would do a great job. A successful natural language deployment means fewer agent transfers, more containment, and higher customer satisfaction.

So what is stopping businesses from completely switching to NLP technology? Well, it takes a huge amount of time (often years) and resources to train the machine. Businesses find it very hard to justify the ROI, and often results vary widely from one system to another. Although I do not see IVR replaced by NLP technology in the near future, I do believe it has the potential of becoming a force to be reckoned with. What do you think? Let me know in the comments!

About Voice Actions

Voice Actions allows the user to say specific commands to get things done such as sending text messages, sending email and listening to music.  However, Voice Actions lags behind Siri in several areas. For example:

• Voice Actions does not have the Artificial Intelligence capabilities that Siri has to provide ‘intelligent’ answers to questions that are not related to the commands it knows.
• Unlike Siri, Voice Actions has no Text To Speech (TTS) capabilities to ‘speak’ back to the user.
• Voice Actions is also unable to have a multi-step ‘conversation’ with the user like Siri.

In response to Siri, Google is planning to make major enhancements to its Voice Actions application.  This effort is called Majel.

About the Majel Theory

Majel comes from Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, better known as the voice of the Federation Computer from Star Trek. The approach that Google is supposedly taking for Majel is to make everything on your phone voice aware.  It is like the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek where you can use a VUI to interact with practically anything on the ship.   Majel is not attempting to give the user the illusion that it is interacting with a ‘human’ but instead it will be clear that you are interacting with an intelligent computer.  This is in contrast to Siri, where Apple has put in a lot of effort to give a ‘personality’ and a sense of humor to the responses you get from Siri.

When Will Majel Be Released?

Google was supposed to release Majel in 2011.  However, with 2011 over now, a more realistic release time is either this month or next.  The first release is supposedly going to be a simple natural language processing engine where the answers will be obtained from a Google search.  More advanced features such as controlling phone actions and other applications are expected later in 2012.

What is the Vision for Majel?

Matias Duarte, the computer-interface designer and user-experience lead for Android, in an interview with The Daily Beast said, “Voice is absolutely going to be an essential part of user interfaces. I mean Google and Android have been working on Voice for years. Even in Ice Cream Sandwich we released significant improvements to the way Voice dictation works. What I think is going to be interesting about Voice is trying to treat Voice as something that is universally accessible in every application and not confine it to just a gimmick or something you only use when you are in the car or on the go.

I really want computers to be multimodal. When you watch a science fiction show like Star Trek, someone walks up to a wall and starts touching things and speaking to a computer at the same time. That’s the way that I think our interfaces need to evolve. You need to be able to start using email, touching things on screen, speak to it, touch more things, and not really have to think about ‘am I using Voice now or not using Voice.’ You just use the computer input that is most natural at that time.”

Matias is proposing a fascinating multimodal interaction that will be accessible from anywhere on the mobile device and  let the user naturally augment her experience through voice interaction. We will have to wait and see if Google follows through on this vision for Majel, but the idea is certainly very compelling.

Will you use Majel when it is finally released? Does it make a difference if the VUI sounds like a human, like Siri, or like a computer, as Majel will? Let us know below!

I feel like a young school boy in love, amazed by the extent of your functionality and appealing voice. However, I’m equally astonished by how much better you can be. Nonetheless, the new Apple commercial which ran to promote you for the holidays was nothing short of FANTASTIC on so many levels. It showed enterprises how easily billion (or even trillion!) dollar businesses like Santa, Inc. can access information easily on the go. This technology is both impressive and a game changer for the mobile and IVR industries. I can’t help but wonder though…how much better of an experience you or someone else can offer the enterprise space …hmmm…stay tuned…

Sincerely,
Your Not-So-Secret Admirer