people get ready
DESCRIPTION
Given at SpeechTEK 2009, NYC.TRANSCRIPT
PHILLIP HUNTER [email protected]
The Experience Economy
• What is good experience?
• How do you create it?
• How do you measure its impact?
PHILLIP HUNTER [email protected]
Good Experience is not
• A particular or more or better technology
• Constrained by channels, modalities, time, place, person, etc.
• Static or permanent
• Able to be fully, and maybe not mostly, controlled
PHILLIP HUNTER [email protected]
Warning Signs• Do you or does someone you know...
• Feel like you might not have a real strategy for your IVR service?
• Not recall the last time your company did a quality of service comparison of all customer channels side-by-side?
• Suspect your IVR policies might be anti-social?
• Believe that mobile, web, Twitter, and Facebook customer interactions have little or nothing to do with IVR?
PHILLIP HUNTER [email protected]
Warning Signs
• Do you or does someone you know...
• Think that “Intelligent IVR” is like Sasquatch, rumored but never seen?
• Get frustrated by the “lack of cooperation” when callers “zero out” of the IVR?
• Think that the word “design” mean flowcharts and functional specifications?
PHILLIP HUNTER [email protected]
Time to Move on
• Speech is the same as DTMF
• Personas must be used, but appropriately
• Both male and female voice talent is best
• “Natural language” won’t get everything
• Containment rates aren’t the right metric
PHILLIP HUNTER [email protected]
How did things get so bad?
• Our customers beat paths to our doors...
• Cost-focus made us decide we’d better put in moats, mazes, and potholes to keep them away
PHILLIP HUNTER [email protected]
But...
• Somehow they keep coming back...
• Even on the phone
• But they figured out how to tunnel under and parachute in.
PHILLIP HUNTER [email protected]
They can think?
• IVR tip sheets
• Direct numbers accessed
• Direct email addresses accessed
• Channel-switching
• Attention-seeking behaviors
• This is not going to stop.
PHILLIP HUNTER [email protected]
But this is an opportunity
• It’s not going to stop
• Embrace or be erased
PHILLIP HUNTER [email protected]
Experience is a Gas
• Expands to fill the space its given
• Pervasive across channels
• Transitory and fragile
PHILLIP HUNTER [email protected]
Experience is Electricity• Jumps to wherever it can move
and live
• Mobile transactions
• Open/new channels
• Powered by outside forces
• cloud data access
• increased savviness
PHILLIP HUNTER [email protected]
Tools are tools
• Technology connects things
• When connections are made, then things happen
• When the right things happen, we are all happy
PHILLIP HUNTER [email protected]
It’s not you, it’s you
• Demand strategies and assistance that make sense and are nimble
• But this is not a problem in search of technology
PHILLIP HUNTER [email protected]
Remember why we are here
• Companies and vendors still treat phone calls as something to deflect
• Faddish techno-think still rules
• Little evolution of IVR
• Designers have let marketers and cranks dominate the conversation
• Lots of negative press
• We fail to learn from history and others’ mistakes
• We ignored, and still do, the rapid growth of alternate channels
• We blindly adhere to “cost control”
• We ignore the vast opportunities that the phone channel allows (billions of touches and chances to impress a customer)
PHILLIP HUNTER [email protected]
Signs of Trouble• The dominant companies give lip-service to truly capable
enterprise IVR
• Rampant consolidation among poorly performing companies, and no one cares
• The use of CTI and other data sources are still not standard
• Stubborn and foolish independence abounds
• Silos remain firmly in place despite customer movements and new corollary channels
• Media coverage focused on bad experience, but no one does anything
• Many apps still sound and behave like its 1989
• Industry financial hardships before the economic crises
• Industry has not been turned to for additional savings in the economic crisis
PHILLIP HUNTER [email protected]
What are you gonna do?
• No, really, what are YOU going to do?
• Are we going to let “good experience” become another buzz phrase?
• Other areas are not
• Customers are not
PHILLIP HUNTER [email protected]
Broken Record time• We have to get serious about
cross-channel analysis and cooperation
• Silo-ed companies are falling by the wayside
• Companies that care about experience are seeing success
PHILLIP HUNTER [email protected]
Getting to the point
• Experience is the now and future
• It is harder and slippier than you think
• But you have to address what your customers are saying they are experiencing