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A New Way to Opt Out of the IVR
Cory blogged last month about Citibank's ad campaign for their new Simplicity credit card, which pushes the ability to press zero to speak directly with an agent. Last night, I caught their two TV ads while watching Dancing with the Stars (which, incidentally is the best reality show ever, and the most delightful piece of dance world camp since Strictly Ballroom).
Both ads parody the difficulties of navigating a frustrating IVR, the first one "Steak" showing a man going through a touchtone menu as his dinner preparations burst into flames, and the second one "Train" another man talking to a speech-enabled IVR as his one-sided conversation draws increasingly negative reactions from nearby passengers.
Of course, the commercials are parodies, and unfair in their details to actual IVRs. But besides being an expression of popular discontent with the IVR that companies ignore at their peril, the second spot raises some interesting issues around speech.
As the ads illustrate, pushing buttons isn't primarily what customers hate about the IVR - it's the maze of menus full of irrelevant and confusing options, the tedium of giving information to the IVR and then repeating it all to an agent, and the frustration of listening to prerecorded messages that can come across as inappropriate or condescending. Nothing about speech automatically solves any of these problems.
Companies that invest in a VoiceXML IVR for the ability to add speech without also considering issues like CTI integration (allowing information to be passed along to agent desktops), dynamically generated interactions (allowing the generation of different IVR menus for different types of customers), or creating a user interface that's genuinely customer friendly shouldn't be surprised when their customers start demanding the sort of immediate access to agents that Citi is advertising.
