Please don't. I had a talk with a shitty AI bot on a Fedex line. It's absolute crap. Just give me a 'Type 1 for x, type 2 for y'. Then I don't need to guess what are the possibilities.
Voice-controlled phone systems are hugely rage-inducing for me. I am often in loud setting with background chatter. Muting my audio and using a touchtone keypad is so much more accurate and easy than having to find a quiet place and worrying that somebody is going to say something that the voice response system detects.
I hate those, too. Especially when others are around.
The interface is so inconsistent between different implementations that they're always terribly awkward to navigate at best, and completely infuriating at worst. I don't like presenting the image of an progressively-angrier man who is standing around and speaking incongruous short phrases that are clearly directed towards nobody at all.
But I've found that many of them still accept DTMF. Just mash a button instead of utter a response, and a more-traditional IVR tree shows up with a spoken list of enumerated options. Things get a lot better after that.
Like pushing buttons at the gas pump to try to silence the ad-roll, it's pretty low-cost to try.
One problem is once you’re in deep building a phone IVR workflow beyond X or Y (yes, these are intentional), callers don’t care about some deep and featured input menu. They just mash 0 or pick a random option and demand a human finish the job and transfer them - understandably.
When you’re committed to phone intent complexity (hell), the AI assisted options are sort of less bad since you don’t have to explain the menu to callers, they just make demands.
The problem here is that if it's something a voice assistant can solve, I can solve it from my account. I'm calling because I need to speak to an actual human.
Im in this business, and used to think the same. It turns out this is a minority of callers. Some examples:
- a client were working does advertising in TV commercials, and a few percent of their calls is people trying to cancel their TV subscriptions, even though they are in healthcare
- in the troubleshooting flow for a client with a physical product, 40% of calls are resolved after the “did you try turning it off and on again” step.
- a health insurance client has 25% of call volume for something that is available self-service (and very visible as well), yet people still call.
- a client in the travel space gets a lot of calls about: “does my accommodation include X”, and employees just use their public website to answer those questions. (I.e., it’s clearly available for self-service)
One of the things we tend to prioritize in the initial conversation is to determine in which segment you fall and route accordingly.
(reposting because something ate your newlines, I've added comments in line)
Im in this business, and used to think the same. It turns out this is a minority of callers. Some examples:
- a client were working does advertising in TV commercials, and a few percent of their calls is people trying to cancel their TV subscriptions, even though they are in healthcare
I guess these are probably desperate people who are trying to get to someone, anyone. In my opinion, the best thing people can do is get a really good credit card and do a charge back for things like this.
- in the troubleshooting flow for a client with a physical product, 40% of calls are resolved after the “did you try turning it off and on again” step.
I bought a Chinese wifi mesh router and it literally finds a time between two am and five am and reboots itself every night, by default. You can turn this behavior off but it was interesting that it does this by default.
- a health insurance client has 25% of call volume for something that is available self-service (and very visible as well), yet people still call.
In my defense, I've been on the other side of this. I try to avoid calling but whenever I use self service, it feels like ny settings never stick and always switch back to what they want the next billing cycle. If I have to waste time each month, you have to waste time each month.
- a client in the travel space gets a lot of calls about: “does my accommodation include X”, and employees just use their public website to answer those questions. (I.e., it’s clearly available for self-service)
These public websites are regularly out of date. Someone who is actually on site confirm that yes, they have non smoking rooms or ice machines that aren't broken is valuable.
One of the things we tend to prioritize in the initial conversation is to determine in which segment you fall and route accordingly.
