Does your phone system implement some interactive voice response, aka IVR? Do you know how bad IVR can drive your customers nuts? It can actually drive them away. Here are a couple of examples from my personal life.
Here in Houston there’s a very successful Greek restaurant called Niko Niko’s. Stella likes this place a lot. I like their food but I don’t like to go there. It’s always busy. It’s simply too noisy a place to have a relaxing meal.
Yesterday Dan York, in his role as Director Of Conversations at Voxeo, gave a webinar* on HDVoice. Dan’s presentation included a good basic introduction to wideband telephony. He cited the well known limitations of the legacy PSTN before moving on to highlight the wideband capabilities of Voxeo’s new Prophesy and Prism product offerings.
This session was part of the companies Jam Session series that introduces new capabilities to developers. To put it simplistically, Voxeo is a tool-maker. The offerings of the tool-makers typically lead the services that we eventually see in the larger consumer space. That makes the tool-makers very important. That the tool-makers show both imagination and leadership is critically important.
Late last week I took an hour to sit through a Voxeo webinar on the impact of IP v6 on SIP communications. It was the latest in their series of Developer Jam Session presentations.
Dan York presented a nice introduction to the issues surrounding IP v6 implementation with respect to real-time communication using SIP. If you’re new to IP v6, as I am, then the recording of that session is a recommended resource.
Sometimes people take the shortest or cheapest path when it really doesn’t serve them well. So it was for my employer. For the past year or more the IVR menu at our main US number was voiced by the CEO of our US operation. Not that his voice is bad, but he’s an ex-pat Englishman with an accent that emphasizes the fact that we’re not a US-based company.
A while ago bkw of Freeswitch fame tweeted something about using Fiverr.com to find Lauri Murdock to voice some IVR. Fiverr.com is a site where people offer whatever service they provide for $5.
Since we had recently made some changes in staffing we needed to rework our IVR tree. I thought, hey for $5 noone is going to complain if we get a nice female voice. So I just ordered recording without asking anyone about it.
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