Anyone else tired of......

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"Neusence calls.A gracious good afternoon!You say a man has been making constant,obscene phonecalls to you???What is his name and address please?? Oh,you don't?Well just what does he say and/or do when he calls??---Yes---Ah ha,--yes ---,wait a minute,wait a minute,--yes,--yes,--Wait a minute,--wait a minute,---he said he was going to do what to you?---Wait a minute.Wait a minute --Was that "F" as in Frank you just said??? Oh my gosh,I can truly understand why you are so upset!!Him giving you all those promisses and not even bothering to leave you his name!!!! Hello!?Hello!?
 
Petek: The ubiquitous telephone voice to which you are referring belonged to a Ms. Jane Barbe. (pronounced barbee) Actually, she passed away just a few years ago. She was not only the "time lady" in many places, but also recorded voice prompts for voice mail and auto-attendent machines.
 
At risk of incurring wrath, I actually design & implement those things (and the rest of what goes into a PBX) for a living.

The ones that are driving you nuts are classic examples of crappy design and crappy user interface.

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I have a few rules about designing voicemail / auto-attendant systems:

1) ALWAYS have an option to reach an Operator via the first menu a caller hears.

2) Never have more than two levels deep, or five choices plus Operator at each level. By "level," I mean a menu, after which you press a button to make a selection. After you reach the main menu, you should be able to make one selection to get to where you want, or at most get to one more menu before you get the option you're looking for. On each menu you shouldn't have more than five options plus Operator. Ideally you shouldn't have more than three options plus Operator.

Typically in my designs, I set up a backup operator group. If the main receptionist is busy and doesn't answer in three rings, another group of employees' phones ring. If no one can answer within six rings, the caller gets a mailbox and can leave a message. The point of this is to increase the probability of a caller reaching a live person instead of having to leave a message.

For most types of businesses, the following is all that's sufficient:

"Welcome to ABC Company. If you know your party's extension please dial it now. To dial by first or last name press Pound. To reach an operator press 0 or stay on the line."

The purpose of the above is to take a good bit of load off the receptionist, who is then free to speak with callers who really do need assistance.

For a wide range of consumer product companies, the following should be added:

"For sales, press 1. For product support, press 2. For billing issues, press 3." And each of those should take you directly to a group of people who can answer your call and provide direct assistance.

In cases where call volume fluctuates and can be high at times, a simple queue such as "All of our agents are busy at the moment. Your call will be answered in the order received. If you want to leave a message and have us to call you back, press 1. To return to the main menu press Star." (The feature that anticipates how long until your call will be answered is a predictive algorithm, and when it makes a mistake, the result is major frustration.)

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Re. overseas employees and "distributed call centers." When you reach someone in e.g. India and can't understand them, it's not their accent, it's the crappy phone system their company has installed. If you spoke with the same person live or on a decent phone, you'd understand them quite well; in fact people speak with people having different accents all the time with little trouble. The problem is the crappy phone system: companies that implement VOIP (internet-protocol telephony) and use the G.729 compression algorithm, which sounds like a bad cellphone. What they should be doing (and what we do wherever possible) is use the G.711 algorithm. The difference between crappy sound and good sound is: crappy sound uses 35K of digital bandwidth, whereas good sound uses 83K of digital bandwidth.

So with crappy sound you can squeeze more people into a carrier circuit. This creates the illusion that your company is saving money on carrier circuits. In fact what happens is, due to the "Huh?" factor ("Huh? What did you say? I can't hear you, could you say that again..?"), each call takes longer, so the number of calls that can be handled per hour is not significantly larger than would occur with better sound (and therefore shorter calls w/o the "Huh?" factor).

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Here's an example of user interface design. Back in the days when the telephone system was "manual," i.e. all calls connected by operators, the Bell System made an interesting discovery. If the operator said, "I'm sorry they won't answer," the caller would be more likely to get frustrated and ask the Operator to ring them longer or louder. Bell implemented a standard by which the Operators would say "I'm sorry they don't answer," and that solved the problem. Reason why: "won't" implies (and in fact literally is) "will not." Saying "won't" implies the Operator knows the called party is in but refusing to answer the phone. Saying "don't" means "does not answer," and is simply the reporting of an empirical fact. Callers accept that and try their calls again later.

So something as simple as a "won't" or a "don't" can make a significant difference in the degree of satisfaction or frustration for the user. This is a good lesson for modern times with respect to the design of voicemail & auto-attendant systems.

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AT&T didn't buy out SBC. SBC bought out AT&T. To get the brand as well as some assets in other related lines of business. Yes there was some chaos when the change first occurred. However a good bit of that was also due to storm damage all over CA: floods up north, wind damage down south. People were working 60-70 hours a week. Turns out I got caught in this one with a client who had a complex repair issue and thought it was my fault when in fact it was water damage to outside cables. Finally we had a meet-me with the client and myself and the SBC tech, who was great. He explained the problem to the client and verified that it was outside plant, not the PBX.

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What really frustrates the hell out of me is "voice recognition." For example, "Say Sales, Support, or Billing." I don't mind pressing buttons, but I do object strongly to being forced to conduct a "conversation" with a machine. OTOH it's a useful reminder of the fact that "certain agencies" are also using voice recognition; for example NSA is 10 years ahead of the civilian sector in this area (as well as most other areas of math, computer science, and associated technologies). "To reach a live Intercept Operator say Anthrax. To have your call transcripts read by an Intel Analyst, say Plutonium. For an in-home visit from Homeland Security, say Assassination..." :-)
 
I'm with the Cingular haters, but I've had to call Cingular lots of times to fix someone's Blackberry or Treo at work and they've ALWAYS been nice and friendly, and willing to help. I just know Suckular has bad coverage where I live where Verion works fine.
 
I do agree that it makes sense to have an auto-attendant initially answer an incoming call, and allow the caller to steer the system to the appropriate department. But, designgeek is so on the mark about "crappy" sounding phone systems. Companies trying to save backhaul charges often use their own networks. The VOIP technology helps them save bandwidth by converting voice into unintelligible gurgling. But there is also one other bandwith-saving voice-maiming technology, used not only in telephone systems, but in cell phone systems, specifically, CDMA.

The culprit is the vocoder. An ancient technology, that has found it's place in modern voice telephony. Most techies,(me included at one time) think the purpose of a vocoder is to convert analog voice to digial and back again. If it just did that, it would save no bandwidth. Here's what it also does:

A vocoder separates the incoming voice diction from its pitch. The pitch and vocal tonality are then converted into narrow band control codes, while the voice diction is sent separately, also occupying a very little bandwidth. Obviously, these are all sent as binary data. At the receiving, the pitch tone control codes are decoded and re-united with the narrow band diction. When everything is perfect, it works ok. If the signal becomes the least bit marginal, the first things to drop out are the pitch and tone control codes. This leaves the listener hearing just the narrow-band diction, which is the robotic "crappy" sound one encounters often with cell phones.

Of course, without vocoder technology, we'd never hear that neat electronic stutter Cher has on the song "Believe".
 
Why they use Touch-Tone menus...

Some people (I think they were at Verizon, or some other company that Verizon subsumed) once did a study in which they recorded every call answered by an automatic answering system, from the beginning when the machine picked up.

They found it saved the human operators a lot of grief from the angriest customers. It actually helped to "calm" frustrated customers, before handing them off to actual humans. The callers would vent their frustration by yelling and cursing at the machine, which of course didn't respond. By the time they gave up and pressed '1' (or whatever) they were resigned and willing to listen to the operator.
 
Rinso, good stuff; are you in the industry? "unintelligible gurling," good phrase, nice and compact, I'll start using it. In the past I've said "Donald Duck talking backwards on acid," and "like talking through a tube from the bottom of a pond." Yours is better.

Cellphone companies have two perverse incentives to keep the sound crappy. One is price competition: people seeking low prices don't seem to mind crappy sound enough to switch carriers. Two is that if you're in the business of selling minutes, you sell more minutes when people waste time repeating themselves.

I consider cellphones acceptable for "messages," i.e. brief calls with a strictly functional purpose such as setting a meet-me time; but not-acceptable for "conversations" i.e. longer calls where crappy sound distracts from the purpose or the vocal nuances needed for effective communication. I don't have a cellphone and am not likely to get one in the near future, primarily because I absolutely detest random interruptions whose only "urgency" is the "need" of people to reach someone "now" rather than "soon." Secondarily, because interruptions on client sites bug clients even if I factor them into the billing. Thirdly because I don't feel like paying for a "modern" device with sound quality that's blatantly worse than the 50-year-old English dial phone (GPO type 232 with integral bell set; think "Dial M for Murder") on my desk.

Another vile thing that cellphones do is compress the sound levels excessively. Background noises are raised in volume to be approximately equal to the voice of the person speaking. Ordinarily this is merely annoying as hell, but when a fire engine (or other loud vehicle) goes by, even in the distance, the siren (or whatever noise) is raised to a shreik (or a roar) that is downright painful.

Just think: here we are in the 21st century putting up with telephones whose sound quality is about the equal of a 1920 "candlestick" desk stand phone. Yech.

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Portendere, interesting item there. Part of that may be due to the fact that emotional states are contagious and are conveyed in part by nonverbal voice information: pitch, rhythm, cadence. Some of those angry callers are calmed down by the effect of a calm voice. However the benefits can be rapidly undone by a nasty menu system or "voicemail jail."

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Among my clients who prefer all live answering (fewer and fewer these days), they generally also want a "backdoor" number for friends, family, and employees, which goes through the auto-attendant. These are callers who always know the extension numbers they're trying to reach, i.e. a field sales rep who has to call his/her supervisor to approve a discount for a client, husbands/wives calling their sweeties at work, etc.

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Question for everyone: Do you prefer pressing touchtone buttons on a conventional menu, or speaking the digits or words to a voice recognition system? If given the choice between "press 1 for sales, press 2 for customer support," and "say -sales- or say -support-" which do you prefer?
 
Pressing buttons. I have a speech impediment which sometimes makes it impossible to answer such that the damn voice recog can understand. I moved a domain registration from NetSol to Godaddy recently. Godaddy's authorization/confirmation system had me to answer a telephone call from their voice recog system, punch in (or state) an authorization code number, and then say my name. The initial sound that came out was not my name, but the system accepted it as my "signature" and hung up. BWAHAHAHAHAAAAAAA!

Another time I was calling Social Security to change the bank info for my grandmother's direct deposit. I went though answering all the questions, the damned thing said one or more of the bit of info didn't match their records and then transferred me to a live rep. I gave her/him/it the exact same info. No clue what part it didn't catch correctly.
 
PeteK, would your preference change if you were using a phone with the dial on the base rather than in the handset?

DADoES: Interesting point about speech impediments and voice recognition! This should be handled as an accessibility issue, and someone should look into that question for instances where a company does not provide a touchtone option or a time-out to operator option.

OTOH the variety of accents found in the US nowadays is sufficient to force the issue on its own: Cantonese vs. French accents for example, could be interesting.

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Any place that uses your SS number as the major part of your ID on call-ins, is highly susceptible to being hacked by identity thieves. Object strongly whenever you run across that one, and demand to set a unique password or PIN.
 
I don't like these auto-attendent systems either-I am a person--not Mr.Machine.Its time to bring LIVE attendents back-Maybe-just Maybe that will improve company images.-and make it easier for customers and clients to communicate.Most of the time I wait for a live operator to answer.Many time the "voice recognition" systems don't work-scrap that.The buttons on the phone work better.I love it when companies brag about when they have "improved" their auto systems-you try top use it and its WORSE!!
 
Designgeek, yes, I've been in the wireless industry for nearly 30 years. And yes, I do possess an old 1940's black, rotary dial telephone, and yes it still sounds better than my cell or my electronic home phone. The voice compressions in cell phones to which you refer, are also buried in the software of a vocoder. Don't you just hate talking to someone who is phoning from a crowded, noisy bar?

Two other vocoder software actions are the Sound Operated Noise Attenuating Device (SONAD) which mutes the recieve path when there is no voice, and the Voice Operated Gain Adjusting Device, which keeps the transmit level constant for different landline side voice loudness characteristics. The action of these two devices is normally a good thing, but in modern cell phone technology, they sometimes causes your conversation to sound like a simplex communication.(only one person can talk at a time, similar to a speaker phone) This is especially true of coversations which have a high level of background noise.

Before there was cellular, there was IMTS. A non-cellular, analog, system. It sounded better. Go figure!
 
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