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November 02, 2005

The Importance of Voice

One of my many mobile service providers is Cingular Wireless. I am extremely loyal to this company - I have had this account the longest, since it was Pacific Bell, in fact. I have always been happy with their coverage, their rate plans are generally fair, and their service is top-notch. I went to the website today to buy a new handset, but I had some questions about accessories and my plan so I thought I would call them up instead. Like every business, they have an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. Here is what I got when I called. (The bold items are my selections.)

Thank you for calling Cingular Wireless. Por informacion en espanol, oprima el asterisco.

If you are calling about number ###-###-####, press 1

To pay your bill or get other bill related options, press 1
Check minutes press 2
For help with voicemail press 3
To report a lost or stolen phone press 4
For an item not covered in this menu or to speak with a customer service representative press 0

So we can quickly transfer you to the person who can best help you please listen to the follow menu:
If you are having problems with your existing phone press 1
For sales, accessories or to purchase another line press 2
For text messaging or mobile internet press 3
For information on closing your account press 4

Please hold while your call is being transferred.

To purchase new service press 1
If you purchased in the last 30 days and need help press 2
For assistance with your current account press 3

Please wait while we transfer your call. This call may be monitored for quality assurance.

Thank you for calling Cingular Wireless. Por informacion en espanol, oprima el asterisco.

I was back at the beginning! I actually went through it again before realizing I was stuck in some sort of IVR temporal loop like in episode 118 of Star Trek: The Next Generation. (Star Trek co-stars like Kelsey Grammer so strain suspension of disbelief that such episodes are instant classics.)

1-0-2-3, 1-0-2-3, 1-0-2-3...like in that Star Trek episode, it would have gone on forever had I not changed that last number. 1-0-2-1 gets you to a salesperson, and he was quite helpful. I also let him know about the IVR loop, and he said he’d let someone know to fix it.

It’s an honest mistake. Programming an IVR deeper than even one submenu requires careful planning and a very large whiteboard. I am sure Cingular isn’t the only company with a minor programming error creating déjà vu (nIb'poH to Klingons) for their callers.

But think about the impact. What if 1-0-2-1, their inbound sales channel, instead resulted in the endless loop and they were essentially shunning their lowest-cost, pre-qualified sales leads? Anyway, this experience just reminded me that I’ve been meaning to talk about how Voice has to change and how important I think the changed version of it will be to the future of media.

To the LMNO, voice interfaces are inherently broken
Worse with all IVRs is that they require the caller to employ an inductive logic Criterion of Adequacy at every submenu. (CoA: As evidence accumulates, the degree to which the collection of true evidence statements comes to support a hypothesis, as measured by the logic, should tend to indicate that false hypotheses are probably false and that true hypotheses are probably true.)

In other words, all IVRs are so complex that there is no way for a caller to deduce that he or she is actually going to eventually arrive at what they were seeking in the first place. You only ever really think you'll probably get there, and a measure of your decreasing confidence is how quickly you press the button that gets you to a live person. Lacking any sort of guaranteed outcome, callers try to guess the right selection at every submenu to at least increase the probability of arriving at what they seek. What they seek is usually a live person, btw, because the most efficient way to answer questions from your customers is not to try to anticipate every single question they could possibly have and present them all of the possible answers. Rather, providing the right interface for the particular exchange of information is the right way to go.

When I call any business and get an IVR, I am immediately unhappy because I know that it is going to take longer to navigate through their challenge/response system than it would to simply talk to a live person. For the most offensive example of this, try calling Amtrak and dealing with “Julie, Amtrak’s automated agent.” You can reach her at 1-800-USA-RAIL. It took me 4 minutes and 43 seconds to learn what exact time a train is leaving tomorrow around noon from San Diego to Los Angeles, and that is before I even attempted to purchase the ticket. I also counted 15 questions by the system in order to provide the information. (Do you know your departure city? Please say your departure city. There are two stations in San Diego, which one do you want? I thought you said Solana Beach, did I get that right? What is your destination? What day do you want to leave? Around what time do you want to leave? Will you also be needing pricing information? Is this an adult? Etc.) I called back and bypassed Julie and got the same information from a live person in less than 12 seconds:
“Hi there, is there a train leaving around noon tomorrow from Solana Beach to Union Station?”
“Yes, at 12:33. Tickets are $22. Would you like to reserve a seat?”

Another good example is American Airlines: 800-848-4653. Of the four top-level menu items, ticket reservations (the primary revenue driver, btw) is the last one. Compare it to Southwest Airlines: 800-I-FLY-SWA. Two rings and a live person answers. I get right to what I wanted in the first place, and Southwest didn’t make me suffer through a tedious process or push to me the responsibility of figuring out how to best navigate their system.

All I am trying to illustrate is that the old media push model apparently applies to voice applications, resulting in inefficiency and barriers creating transactional friction. IVRs push the responsibility to choose the right path to the consumer rather than enabling them to effectively pull what they need. The shift we are seeing in media in general must also apply to voice, as the lines are blurring between media and personal communication: It must move from a push model from the center of the network to a pull model at the edge of the network.

Voice as a distributed media application
Voice will evolve in the new media future. Think of voice as an additional application that augments some existing core functionality. Southwest Airlines is not in the telephony business, but they know a lot of people have telephones, so they built the most transparent use of that technology to augment their core business. It’s an enabler. I know that’s not a particularly insightful observation, given that for as long as I have been alive, the world economy has been largely driven by the application of technology to existing businesses.

But what about media companies? A good example of a media voice application is MovieFone. It’s a good use of IVR to provide access to movie listings and times. If voice is an enabler and the media business model shifts from a push model to a media networking model, then voice will exist to enable it, right? How important is voice specifically to whether or not they win the battle for media supremacy? That depends on whether I am right about the most likely future media titans being an LMNO.

If the future winners in the media space are the ones who understand that media is a form of communication and that personal media created at the edge of the network will drive more value than media produced at the center of the network, then voice will figure prominently in the future media titan’s offering because it is the most intuitive communication interface we have and will naturally be used to augment the exchange of personal media.

Why did Ebay buy Skype? I have seen many justifications posit that since Ebay has so many small business customers to which they can market additional services, they could become the telephony provider of choice for the web-based small business market, just like buying PayPal made sense as the de facto financial clearinghouse of the same realm. Maybe, and it makes a lot of sense, but I don’t think it is as compelling as a simple bolt-on to their core offering, which is auctions. Giving people a click-and-talk interface would dramatically decrease the already low friction involved in the bidding process and the associated required communication around it, as would a hosted IM solution. Skype provides this, but Ebay didn't have to buy Skype to achieve it.

Ebay fits my definition of an LMNO: They enable people to post media for the purpose of networking with other people they don’t know in a geographically related environment. Given the time-based aspect of their business, I personally think the last mile for Ebay is a more useful “anytime, anyplace” upstream and downstream mobile app (not just the simple one-way bidding thing they launched over a year ago) to put this functionality in their users’ pockets. But that’s a separate thought.

Ebay as a media company is a bit of a stretch for some people, so how about Yahoo, IAC or Newscorp? All of these media companies will eventually have to deploy voice as part of their media offerings. Newscorp apparently understands well the future of media. With the shrewd acquisition of MySpace, they bought themselves a media networking platform. If Newscorp understands that content in the future has a lower value than the community, communication and connection around the content, then Newscorp will add voice to augment their growing LMNO offering. The interesting thing about it is that they don’t have to pay billions of dollars for Skype if they want to enable their media offerings. They need a tool they can bolt on that adds a button attached to every content channel that says “click here to talk to this…[whatever].” It could be a sports television personality looking for commentary from someone in the stands, a news anchor reporting on a hurricane who wants to broadcast from within someone’s house in the eye of the storm, or it could simply be another person who went to the U2 concert that you want to chat with. It will not be an IVR.

VoIP is making voice as an application possible, and the truly visionary companies understand that it is an integral part of the media networking future. Pay attention to the small voice providers and pay attention to the media companies and tell me if you start to see some patterns emerge where they intersect.

Posted by Shawn Conahan at November 2, 2005 12:18 PM

Comments

Posted by: Sunder at November 3, 2005 09:36 AM

Posted by: Shawn Conahan at November 3, 2005 09:55 AM

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