Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Our menus have changed....more IVR Humor

It's almost a cliche to hear an opening statement in an IVR that says something to the effect of "please pay careful attention as our menus have recently changed". We've all heard that kind of introduction when calling a self-service application and probably thought "why", just get to the menu items.

Most experienced voice user interface designers agree that you should never include this kind of statement in your prompting. It's simply not needed and can be problematic in some situations. If your callers are infrequent users, they could care less about the message and in fact it can be distracting from the real menu items. If your callers are "power users" who call frequently they will self discover the changes immediately and course correct at once without the need for the warning prompts.

I ran across a great parody of the classic "our menus have changed" application at:888-583-2801. Give it a call and have a little chuckle!

Thursday, November 06, 2008

A Little IVR Humor . . .

It's sad, but far too many people really expect to find something like this when they find an automated customer service system answering at the other end of the phone call . . . I ran across this on the web and it had me laughing out loud.

Thanks to vCom Solutions the sponsor of this little bit of humor.

It is a perfect example of how not to do self-service and why speech is a better option when compared to DTMF (touch tone) self-service.

Click on the posting title to hear for yourself . . . you'll be taken to a new URL.

Enjoy!