Ifbyphone Blog

Mike Cooch outlines six basic essentials for a good website and delivers solid information on how to achieve it in this month’s Everon Technology Insider. Rule number six is: “Clear “conversion” path/instructions.”

It’s a sad commentary that ten years after the Internet revolution many websites are their own worst enemies when it comes to conversion. Conversions go down when the number of steps goes up. Click-to-call cuts those steps — especially when there are several choices. As someone once said: “Systems run best when they run downhill.” 

Remember the old slogan, Things go better with Coke? It didn’t say that all you need is Coke – just that things were better, more fun with a Coca-Cola in hand. Voice works the same way, as Thomas Howe Company points out in a recent post, Voice is Spice.

Instead of trying differentiate your solution by making voice communications do something different – like instant messaging or microblogging – use voice to “spice up” other common applications.

Let voice add more information and personalization to business processes. Use it to streamline workflow or capture information like the specific keywords customers use when they call your business. But don’t put the cart before the horse. Voice isn’t the central function, but its addition makes the whole process work better.

Thomas Howe uses the example of paprika to make the point.”…if a paprika CTO faced the same problems as the telecom market, the response might be to produce paprika soup…the proper response isn’t to pretend that paprika is the important part, but to find other recipes that would benefit from its rich, red color.”

Just like your mother used to tell you: You only have one chance to make a first impression and first impressions count. On the Web, that first impression is your landing page.

Yet more often than not, businesses neglect that all-important first impression even as they spend ever-increasing amounts of time and money on PPC advertising, keyword bidding and Web analytics. And that neglect is costing companies big time, according to Web marketing guru Tim Ash who’s written several recent columns on the subject at SearchEngineWatch.com.

Here’s what he has to say in Your Baby’s Ugly - Why You Need Landing Page Optimization Now 

“…landing pages typically range from barely acceptable to horrible. They are often at direct cross-purposes with the desired conversion action and stated goals of the business.”

I’ll leave it to Ash to give you the nitty-gritty about optimizing your landing page – not surprisingly, he’s written a book about it.

In the meantime, you might want to check out  Optimize and Prophesize blogger Jonathan Mendez’  basic rules for making the right first impression with your landing page. These include a clear and direct statement of your value proposition, a persuasive call to action, and – the one that caught my attention – a Large Red Button 

“Tell your brand team to go to hell and throw your styleguide out the window. Red buttons can by themselves raise your conversion rate…most times in our testing if color matters it is red that wins. Also, don’t skimp on button size. Make users notice where the button is…”

This is a perfect fit for click-to-call. But don’t neglect the text that goes with it. Mendez suggests a “soft” call to action like ‘Get a free quote’ — instead of  ‘Schedule an appointment’ - because it feels easier and less like a commitment. Even if that visitor doesn’t buy today, by making a connection you can start building a relationship.

Creating an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) can be as simple as recording a few prompts, telling a customer to press one or two, and routing the caller to an operator at the end of the call. But to create an effective, seamless, and confusion-free IVR that allows you to use a computer where a live person once was needed requires more thought and planning. It doesn’t need to be a painful process, but careful outlining of what you want to do and, more importantly, what you want a customer to do will ensure an IVR that is not just another component to your business but an essential feature of your business’s communication structure.

So, you want to create an IVR to expedite telephone product sales, manage a customer service department, or develop a phone directory for a 100-employee company (or a 5-employee company). Now what?

1. A good IVR is short and to the point – no unnecessary questions or prompts. The first thing you need to do is think about what the most important pieces of information are that you want to deliver to your customers or that you need from them. A good way to manage this process is to think about the five most important prompts or questions you want to play for or ask of your customers, and begin there. Then, as time goes and as you continue to watch how the IVR is working for you, you can add or remove those prompts and questions that do not add to the overall quality of the IVR. Less is more. Start with a few prompts and build as your employees or customers get more comfortable with it.
2. Create an effective opening prompt. Be brief, concise, and polite – watch out for 30-second introductions or too many multi-syllabic words, and make sure you appear grateful that the employee or customer is calling in to your IVR.
3. Have the system refer to itself as “I.” Customers prefer to hear a first-person IVR rather than a generic “system.”
4. If you have an IVR that is longer than four prompts, let a caller know what they can expect from the system immediately. Customers don’t like it when they can’t see the end of the tunnel. Either have the IVR share how many questions and which they are answering or provide some glimpse of the number of questions or time it will take to complete the IVR in your introduction.
5. Take advantage of Ifbyphone’s speech-recognition software and give customers the option to traverse the IVR by either using touch-tone buttons or speaking their answers. Make sure they know that speech is an option.
6. If you decide to allow speech-recognition answers, make it clear what the answer needs to be and use two or three syllable responses so as not to confuse the customer, or the system. Answers of a couple words can work well because they give the system a more precise speech target to search for.
7. Be concise, and make sure that you use the same language to describe the same nouns or processes throughout the IVR. An article on the Ifbyphone blog titled “How To Make Prompts Consistent” does an excellent job of explaining just how to do this. Break down the different “names” (what you would call something) and “actions” (something you ask a customer to do), and ensure that there is a consistency throughout. If you tell a customer to “enter two” at one place and to “press three” in another, you’re not being consistent. Likewise, if you call something a “menu” in one prompt, you don’t want to refer to it as a “message” later on.
8. Think about the Barge-In Factor. On the Ifbyphone system, you have the option to Allow Barge-In or not. If your customers will be interacting with an IVR in a loud place, the background noise may affect the voice recognition system, and you may not want to allow barge-in. However, if you expect most customers to be at home or in an office, then barge-in is a useful feature to speed up an IVR.
9. Think about the Touch Tone Only Factor. If you select this, the system won’t accept any voice responses, only numbers entered in on a touch tone phone. It’s another useful tool for customers who have a lot of background noise, but also a convenient way to simplify an IVR. Giving customers the option to say or enter in their responses isn’t always necessary; sometimes the simple press of a button will do. If you turn on “Touch Tone (DTMF) only” and Allow Barge-In at the same time, you can create an IVR that is very quick and easy to navigate.
10. Create an option to always allow customers to access human help and let them know about it. Depending on the type of IVR you are setting up, you may want to keep in mind that people become frustrated, annoyed, and may eventually hang up if they cannot access human help when the IVR doesn’t appear to suit their needs.

As much as I’d like to attend the eComm conference, I can’t be there in person because of a schedule conflict; if you can, try to make it to the conference, which promises to be very interesting. Ifbyhnone is one of the sponsors, by the way.

And Ifbyphone helped sponsor one of the more interesting demos, written by yours truly. To help you find the way… here’s something new. Call +1 312 252 1758 to get directions to the conference location. And you don’t have to enter an starting address — instead, you enter a phone number.

This demo is based on a very simple principle: if I know a phone number, there’s a good possibility I know the location of that phone number.

Here’s a simple example. I’m driving along in an unfamiliar city on my way from the airport to a meeting. I get a bit lost. I don’t really know what street I’m on, and often I might not even be certain what town I’m actually in. As a result, most conventional map services won’t help me — I need to enter an address for them to work. Besides, map services require keyboards and that’s not useful (or safe) when I am trying to drive.

A GPS system would work, but I’d still have to enter my destination, which isn’t fun while driving. The same for cell phones that locate (approximately) where you are based on proximity to cell phone towers. Even worse, that requires that I download the cell-phone-tower-finding software to my cell phone in advance. And what if I’m using a plain old telephone inside a gas station to get the directions?

The easiest way to find a location is to do something the telephone is designed to do: enter a telephone number. Telephone numbers are everywhere: on doors of businesses, on signs, in people’s homes, at the desks of hotel lobbies. If you’re driving along and you see a telephone number, you can use the “Phone 2 Directions” service to get directions.

The basic idea is quite simple. By performing reverse directory lookup, Phone 2 Directions finds the starting location and the destination; it gets the route from a driving-directions service; it reads the results back. It’s a great solution for this problem> I call this idea “Telephone Accessible Geotags,” using telephone numbers as a way to find and mark physical locations, and there are many more services that quickly come to mind.

You can just contact me if you’d like to use a hosted version of this software. I can set you up with a turnkey version.

If you want to roll your own version of if you’re interested in technical details, here they are. The demonstration is hosted at Ifbyphone, which provides the telephony, speech recognition, and text-to-speech services. The interface to Ifbyphone uses the familiar web services pattern, and Phone 2 Directions is one of the first “phone mashups” available. Ifbyphone gives away one million minutes (yes — that’s 1,000,000 minutes) of phone connection time to developers each month. If you want an account with them to try your own phone mashup, just sign up.

The source code for a demonstration version of this software is available in open-source.

Here’s a short letter from the editor of Speech Technology Magazine, the one company you’d think would positively, absolutely get their phone IVR to sound absolutely wonderful. That turns out not to be the case… in fact, they don’t even use speech recognition!I know they investigated and solved the problem (I visited their offices recently); when they provide a follow-up letter about this incident I’ll post that link as well.The moral of the story: think for yourself and think for your customers. First, think for yourself. Don’t blindly copy idiotic statements from other systems (”Please pay attention as our menu options have changed”) that are (a) not true and (b) not useful.And second, think for your customers. Again, it’s easy enough to put yourself into your customer’s shoes. Will your customers be mollified if you say “your call is important to us” or will they feel patronized? (Hint: when you call someone else’s system, how do you feel about that announcement?)

One of the most important things I do when I write an application is check for consistent prompts. What do we say to the customer? Do we say the same thing everywhere, or do we suddenly change our minds half-way through the application?Here’s an example from what I’m working on today. The client supplied the following prompt:

Press # or say “main menu” at any time during this message to go to the options menu.

How do I check this prompt to make certain that it’s (a) consistent and therefore (b) not confusing?I start out by underlining each individual “name” and each individual “action” in the prompt. A “name” is the name of something: for example, what you and I would call an account number some applications call a “customer number.” An “action” is something that we ask the customer to do, or that the customer wants to do; for example, we might ask the customer to “say” the account number, “press” a button, or the customer may wish to “transfer” funds.Here’s a table of all the names and actions I found in the prompt, in order:

Then I start checking for consistency. I looked through this application and made a decision: during the application, we will always use “press” consistently; we won’t use “press” in some places and “enter” in others. We will also use “say” consistently.But the rest of this prompt poses further problems. First of all, the action “#” (pressing that particular key) isn’t consistent with other places; it’s the only # in the entire application. The “options menu” wasn’t defined anywhere — in fact, although I am developing the software, even I can’t figure out which menu is the “options” menu. And furthermore why require someone to say “main menu” if they want to go to the “options” menu — that’s not consistent even in the same prompt! Actions should always be consistent with names whenever possible.”Go to” is an action that the user might want to do, but the wording has to be consistent with other places in the application. Finally, the name “this message” might not be consistent with the idea that we’re in a “menu.” Is this a “message” or a “menu?”In the end, I was able to straighten this out. The call flow is really just returning the user to the previous menu, and now I use the words “previous menu” everywhere in the application and also always use the * key to or the words “previous menu” to get there. I also use “return to” when I’m returning rather than “go to.” The prompt now reads something like this:

To return to the previous menu, say “previous menu” or press *.

I use the exact same wording for this prompt everywhere in the document.With consistent prompts, callers will be more comfortable with the application because they won’t have to re-learn how the application behaves each time they encounter a prompt, and they can focus on the content of the questions rather than trying to figure out what the questions mean in the first place.

Verizon did something quite remarkable with their new cellular telephones: the phones alert you — as well as anyone else nearby — when you dial the police emergency number. As you might imagine, that’s not always a good thing. More precisely, Verizon is implementing a government mandate that cellular phones notify you when they connect to 911. It’s a bad idea in the first place, of course, but that’s the fault of the FCC. Customers are up in arms.

Now apply this lesson to your telephone service. Your customers are calling from a busy street corner, from an airport lounge, or from a fast-food restaurant. What information do you demand from your customers when they call you? Is that information something they’d be comfortable saying out loud?

Although a person’s social security number and mother’s maiden name has to be one of the worse-kept secrets in the entire world, as it’s known to any one of the millions of merchants who have access to a person’s credit records, people still consider that information to be very private (and rightfully so). Do you demand that your customers provide this highly confidential information over the phone? Do you find that customers are reluctant to give this information out unless they’re speaking to a person?

When I’m in a public place, I don’t like to say my credit card number out loud over the telephone even though a credit card number isn’t much of a secret. The three-digit or four-digit codes that have recently appeared on credit cards are now supposed to be the “real” secret, and I certainly wouldn’t like to give that number out loud.

So, the question becomes: what information do you actually need from your customers? What is the least intrusive information you can request? How can you make your customers comfortable about saying this information out loud?

When I go to Starbucks for a cup of tea, I’m always asked what size tea I want. At first I didn’t want to spend time remembering Startbucks’ silly jargon for the different sizes, and I tried to tell them “small” or “medium”; but then I found they would repeat “tall” and “grande” back at me and expect me to parrot the words back at them. I realize that the people behind the counter are only doing their job, but frankly I always try to get tea elsewhere rather than put up with this rather annoying Starbucks marketing trick.

What about your company? Do you expect your customers to learn how to speak to you, or are you responsible for listening to them? Almost every company develops an internal jargon, but that jargon can cause real trouble if you start using it to talk to customers.

Let me give you an example of a poorly-designed telephone application. A few years back I called a local hospital to check up on a bill. I got their automated billing system, and that’s where the fun began. “Please enter your group number. The group number is the two digits to the right of the dash in your account number.” This announcement was so wrong in so many ways that I can’t begin to recite them all, but here’s the summary:

• Trying to teach me their internal jargon (”group number”) was a huge mistake;
• They could have just asked for the entire account number and sorted out what they needed without getting me involved;
• I was so bemused and flustered by the directions that I entered the digits to the left of the dash, and that was that for the phone call.

The basic lesson is quite simple. For a phone application to work successfully, you can’t confuse your customers and they shouldn’t have to learn new tricks. Your announcements have to use words that your customers expect to hear, and the choices that you offer should make sense to the customers.

How do you know what they expect to hear? Listen to what they ask and echo it back to them. If they ask for “a medium cup of tea,” don’t offer them a “grande,” offer them a medium cup of tea. They’ll be happier and less confused; and a happy, less-confused customer will use your telephone application instead of demanding to speak to a live operator.