Two sides of the same IVR.

You've probably heard of Paul English by now. He's the guy who put together the increasingly famous "IVR Cheat Sheet," a sort of step-by-step "how-to" guide for customers who hate automated systems and want a fast way to be connected to a carbon-based life form with a pulse. Via viral e-mails and news reports, the IVR Cheat Sheet has escalated in popularity and legend and has now turned into a high-traffic Web site called GetHuman.com, a database of companies with large customer bases and tips for navigating through their self-service systems to not only get to a human, but get customer issues dealt with more successfully.

For example, for my customer service nemesis, Comcast, there are instructions to either press "000" to be connected with a human, or alternatively to do nothing ... be silent and wait, press no buttons, and be connected with a human. I checked it out. It works. Up until now, I had been convinced that Comcast didn't actually employ any humans.

But as we know from school, every action has a reaction. Angel.com, a McLean, Virginia-based provider of on-demand call center and IVR solutions, was the first company to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by Paul English.

Angel.com responded to the "IVR Cheat Sheet" by releasing an "IVR Cheat Sheet for Businesses," a list of tips companies can use to make their IVR systems more user-friendly and efficient. It includes practical tips such as letting callers know what to expect upfront from the IVR, never hiding the method to connect to a live agent, always announcing to queued callers an approximate wait time, and avoiding making customers repeat their information each time they get transferred. (You can view the IVR Cheat Sheet For Businesses at www.tmcnet.com/259.1). The company also responded by purchasing the Google keyword "Paul English," so searchers looking for information on the IVR Cheat Sheet find Angel.com's Web site as the number one sponsored link. English had some comments for Angel.com that would have gotten him thrown off the playground if this had been grade school. There have also been stories of fake comments in support of Angel.com posted on the blogs of major media outlets that have covered the story.

Angel.com responded once again by announcing last month's launch of IVR University, its online training and development resource to teach best practices for IVR design and implementation. According to Angel.com, the mission of IVR University is "to promote the best practices of IVR design and implementation, to ensure a useful and efficient caller experience, and to help businesses optimize their phone-based customer service." Best practices instruction and certification are available for voice user interface (VUI) design, IVR application development and CRM/database integration, among other topics.

They way I look at it, any rhetoric against Paul English and his IVR Cheat Sheet is self-delusion. The Teleservices Sales Rule taught us all that if an industry doesn't effectively self-regulate an unpopular technology or business practice (i.e., outbound telemarketing in the case of the TSR), there are government agencies and politicians happy to step in and go overboard on regulating. (In the politicians' case, particularly when there are votes to be bought by opposing an unpopular technology.) Poorly designed IVRs are universally hated. Perhaps you have seen the Citicard television commercial in which a nerdy-looking man accidentally sets his kitchen on fire while trying to cook dinner and navigate an evil IVR menu tree ("For customer service in English about an existing account, press 57"). The commercial makes us laugh because the complaint is universal, along with those impossible-to-open plastic clamshell packages and long lines and inept service at the Department of Motor Vehicles. We love to complain about them.

Many producers of IVR have a good counter-point to all this: that bad IVR design is usually the fault of the company that buys and configures the IVR, not the manufacturer. An IVR menu tree can be configured to be as simple and user-friendly or as evil and blood-pressure escalating as a customer service organization wishes. But in light of the IVR's persona non grata status in popular culture, many customer service organizations are beginning to realize that promising simple navigation and easy access to human agents is a marketing differential. Citicorp is only the first to begin using it as a competitive point in their advertising. Others will surely follow.

The ironic part is, what both sides' opinions boil down to is: IVRs need to be better designed because customers hate them. The rest is ... oh, I don't know ... rhetoric that's just exciting enough to get everybody into editorials in the Wall Street Journal, MSNBC, National Public Radio's Morning Edition, ABC's World News Tonight and others, including, of course, the highly coveted, world-famous back page of Customer Inter@ction Solutions magazine.

The editor, who believes that if Dante had had plastic clamshell packaging in his day, he would have relegated a special circle of his inferno for the designers of such packaging, can be reached at [e-mail].

By Tracey E. Schelmetic

Editorial Director, Customer Inter@ction Solutions

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