Posts Tagged Community
The IVR Clinic with Allison Smith
Allison Smith, The Asterisk Voice
The 15 Commandments of IVR
Commandment #3: Keep Things Simple
So far in this Blog Series, we’ve covered the first two “commandments” of writing clean, easy-to-use IVR systems:
- Commandment #1: Don’t Overestimate Your Listener’s Attention Span
- Commandment #2: Thou Shalt Not Create Fake Mailboxes.
Both really key points: many writers of IVR systems feel like they have their callers “captive”, and that now that they have them listening them to their menu of options, now is a great opportunity to sell to them; to educate them in detail, and to reassure them that they’ve made the right decision by calling their company (which can be artificially made to sound bigger and more impressive than it actually may be by creating fake options and forcing callers to listen to the entire selection of options which, essentially, go nowhere.)
The customers who call into your business are busy people. They are probably over-stressed multi-taskers who simply want to accomplish what they need to accomplish in this call and move along. Your job – as the constructor of the telephone systems which “sorts” callers into appropriate departments – is to make their experience in your IVR as simplified and efficient as possible – hence Commandment #3: Keep Things Simple.
If it feels like I’m belaboring the point of simplicity, brevity, and clarity to death, I likely am. As someone who on a daily basis voices systems for a myriad of companies, I can tell you that I always have in mind – while I’m voicing the prompts – how it will feel when someone will call into this system. Will they let out a sigh, dejected, as they realize that in order to get to the department they need to speak with, they will *first* have to endure a commercial, emphasizing the benefits and wonderments of the company they’ve dialed? Will they become overwhelmed and confused by too many options – or options which are so similar as to confuse the decision of which to press? Will their selection be filtered down into too many confusing subsets?
It goes both ways: you will want to ensure that the information you’re asking for from callers is information which will not overload your organization, or make it a challenge to follow through. Just last week, I read a mailbox greeting which instructed the callers: “…For a faster response, please leave your name, number, and brief message explaining why you’re interested in partnering with us, along with your commitment level, your main passion, and the reason why you have decided to enter our industry.” You could really be inviting trouble there; most people wouldn’t likely take advantage of the situation and leave a half-hour long manifesto. But a surprisingly large number will. You need to invite that same clarity, brevity, and economy in a request for incoming information if you have any hope of boiling down the information gathered into a useful form and following through.
Reduce down the choices into the simplest options. Get callers to their needed department as quickly as possible. Don’t ask for information to be input – such as pin or account numbers – if the live agent is just going to ask for the information again. And above all: respect the caller’s time and energy.
Next blog: we’re going to be drilling deeper into the mechanics of sorting your callers into various departments, by giving them the option of not participating in the format you’ve designed at all. That’s right: we’ll be tackling Commandment #4: Always Give Callers an Opt-In.”
Watch for the next blog entry in about two weeks time! Thanks for reading, and your comments are most appreciated!
Speech Recognition and Text-to-Speech Solutions for All
Guest Blogger - Tim Kruse is the VP of Sales and Business Development for Incendonet, a Digium software partner. He has been involved with speech recognition and advanced communication solutions for more than 15 years and will be presenting during an upcoming webinar on July 13th at 12PM CST. Register Now
I have been working with speech recognition technology since 1999 and appreciate how far the technology has come. As with many technologies we come across, the more we all use them the better they seem to work. We all become trained by our daily interactions. If technology is useful, affordable and easy to implement than eventually most of us will adopt it.
For many Small and Medium sized Businesses (SMBs), the idea of implementing advanced speech recognition and text-to-speech solutions hasn’t really occurred. Most aren’t aware that speech recognition based offerings created with SMBs in mind even exist. Even in today’s Internet age with websites, social networking, chat, email, and text messaging, our business phone system is still the focal point of interactions with our customers, and speech recognition has been shown to be the preferred method for interacting with self-service applications. SMBs need to do more with less, better serve their customers, project a professional image to the outside world and allow their employees to be more productive in today’s mobile world. Here are some of the ways my company has helped SMBs. use speech recognition based solutions.
- A small school district was inundated with calls first thing in the morning and when school let out in the afternoon. A significant portion of the calls were simple call transfer requests. The school district implemented our speech-attendant to off load call transfers and freed up help desk employees to better serve parents with more complex inquiries.
- A construction company needed our help so their field workers collaborate by calling one main number and simply stating the person or the department they needed to reach. These workers were able to collaborate as necessary with safe hands-free and eyes-free access to each other as well as stay connected to their corporate e-mail and calendars using simple, spoken commands.
- A winery located in California, where hands-free legislation exists for mobile phone users when driving, wanted to better serve their customers by replacing their dial-by-name directory with our speech-attendant. To improve collaboration for their field workers they also created a custom sub-directory of employee’s mobile phone numbers.
With Digium’s support of standards like SIP, companies of all sizes have the power and flexibility to easily add speech recognition based solutions to their VoIP phone systems. Specialized VoIP appliances such as Switchvox and SpeechBridge enable SMBs to implement advanced communications solutions previously reserved for only large enterprises and call centers.
Tim Kruse, VP of Sales and Business Development for Incendonet, will be the featured speaker at the next Asterisk In-Depth Webinar. The webinar will take place on Tuesday, July 13th at 12PMCST. Register Now.
Digium’s Fond Farewell to Jared Smith
It is with a mixture of pride and sorrow that I share the news that long-time Digium employee and Asterisk community member Jared Smith is leaving Digium to become the Fedora Project Leader, employed by Red Hat. Jared has contributed to the Asterisk community for the better part of a decade, and has worked tirelessly for the last few years at Digium in community relations and training roles. I’m confident that he will remain engaged with Asterisk — he assures me he’ll be at Astricon in October — but it will be a challenge to find such a capable and committed colleague to take his place within the ranks of Digium. We wish Jared all the best in his new role, and we’re confident he’ll do well there. We’ll certainly miss him here.
Digium’s Training Department has been working on some exciting projects, and more work remains to be done. If you know Asterisk, have an interest in training, and want to work for Digium, we’d love to hear from you! Contact us at training@digium.com. And stay tuned to digium.com/training to hear what we’re up to…
New to Asterisk? Learn how to get started today!
Posted by admin in asterisk, AsteriskNOW, digium, switchvox on July 2, 2010
Watch this new video from Digium to learn how you can get started with Asterisk! During the presentation you will learn:
What is Asterisk?
* What can I do with Asterisk?
* Which version should I use?
* How do I get started?
Conference Call Etiquette
Polycom, one of the premier listings in AsteriskExchange.com, recently shared a helpful guide to conference call etiquette. Here are their Top 10 Do’s and Don’ts of a Conference Call:
Do’s
- Watch the clock. Make good use of everyone’s time.
- Come to the call with an agenda, clear objectives, and role expectations.
- Make sure to provide a quick overview at the start of the call as well as a quick summary at the end of the call.
- Introduce all parties on the call. Always introduce participants to each other and acknowledge new attendees as they join the call.
- Ensure participants are following along. When referring to slides during a presentation, number the slides and clarify as you move from one slide to the next so that all callers can easily follow along.
- Pay attention. This may seem to be a given, but it’s not always that easy to do.
- When you’re on a conference call at your desk, it’s often very tempting to check e-mail, work on documents or do other personal work. Typing on a keyboard is disruptive, however, and callers can hear you. In addition, you may miss the flow of conversation and progress in the meeting.
- When you’re in a conference room, avoid using your mobile device to check e-mail during the conference call.
- Forward incoming calls to voicemail. When joining the conference call from your desk, be sure other incoming calls will not cause a disruption.
- Turn off your cell phone ringer, pager, etc.
- Speak using a ‘normal’ tone of voice. Today’s conference phones offer excellent acoustic clarity. Yelling or speaking too quietly is distracting.
Don’ts
- Don’t put the call on hold. If you have to step away, use mute hold because music is very disruptive to others on a call.
- Don’t interrupt. Give others a chance to finish what they are saying before speaking.
- Don’t have side conversations. They are a distraction to those listening from the other end.
From phones to software to complete business communication solutions, the Asterisk Exchange showcases solutions that extend the power of Asterisk. To find conference phones that are certified to work well with Asterisk, visit the Polycom listing on AsteriskExchange.com.
Straight from the Source’s Mouth: Three Insiders Speak About Asterisk
We invite all of our friends in Europe to stop by the AstriEurop exhibition taking place April 14 – 16th in the Espace Champerret in Paris. AstriEurop is the meeting place of European Asterisk© Community: The leading VoIP services providers, manufacturers, designers, integrators, distributors, carriers and more will be there to show their new products and services and to share their views on the market and future of Open Source telephony in Europe.
Mark Spencer, Russell Bryant and Matt Fredrickson will be presenting at the conference as well as joining Steve Sokol and Tristan Barnum in the Digium booth.
Hope to see you in Paris!
- Digium presentations
Open Source Asterisk: From the Garage to the Enterprise - Mark Spencer, Chairman and CTO, April 14th , 10:0Am – 10:45AM. Mark will discuss the current trend of Open Source software in the communications market. He will provide a brief history of how Asterisk has gone from a side project in his spare time to the largest open source telephony project in the world, and he will give some insight on the current market and future directions of open communications. Calling into reference several examples of large deployments of Asterisk in Europe and around the world, Mark will describe how enterprises, governments, and small businesses all benefit from the components and design of the Asterisk platform.
Advances in Asterisk’s ISDN Support – Matt Fredrickson, Software/Hardware Engineer: April 15th, 12:00 PM – 12:45. This talk will cover Asterisk’s support for ISDN. This not only will include an overview of Asterisk’s traditional supported feature set, but also will cover some advances and support for new features and ISDN supplementary services within Asterisk, particularly those that are of interest to European businesses and enterprises.
Asterisk Update: 1.8 New Features – Russell Bryant, Engineering Manager, Open Source Software: April 16th, 12:00 PM – 12:45 PM. The Asterisk development community has been extremely active in 2009 and 2010. This talk will cover some of the new things that have been developed recently, what is being worked on today, and what new things are planned for the near future. The talk will be mainly focused on what will become the next major release of Asterisk, Asterisk 1.8, released sometime later this year.
AstriCon 2010: Back to Basics
As the Asterisk project has grown, the complexity of deployments has increased, and the number of solutions surrounding the project has exploded in quantity. Each year, the process of choosing what talks to put in AstriCon has become more difficult, and we have seen a wealth of topics that seem to focus more and more on the very large issues surrounding deployment of Asterisk. Architectural concepts, scaling methods, and integration with various other tools have become a theme. This is due to the Asterisk project maturing – no longer is this just a developer conference; it’s now a conference for developers and integrators, decision-makers, resellers, consultants, vendors, to name just a few of the categories of attendees. The topics have become broader as the deployment of Asterisk has become broader, and the complexity of some of the implementations cannot be delved into at a detailed level in just ~35 minutes, so we have lost some of the rough edges that have characterized AstriCon in years past when it was populated entirely by code-hackers and dialplan gurus. However, perhaps we have swung a bit too far towards the more high-level talks, and it’s time to do a slight course correction back into where the community wants us to go.
Quite a few people talked to me after the show last year and lamented the lack of some of the more fundamentally technical talks – the talks where there is a set of dialplan instructions up on the screen, where the audience is scrolling through their own configs during the talk trying to put together some version of what the speaker is discussing. I agree with that assessment – we had great talks last year, but we did have a lower quantity of “bare metal” talks than the previous year (though still quite a few!)
Knowing that we have this desire by the community to get back to the technical basis for the conference, we’ve arranged the tracks this year to more clearly address functional concepts instead of business concepts. The addition of “Asterisk Fundamentals” as a track is in response to the community request to get back to the basics of why many people come to AstriCon – they come to learn. The learning that is done at AstriCon always impresses me – the chance to talk informally with so many people who are doing amazing things is the biggest reason to make it to the show. But the content of the tracks is the most structured way of distributing knowledge. Of course we still have a big place in our heart for the talks centered around business concepts such as Case Studies (which are often a great mix of business and technical) as well as the wide-ranging topics that will appear in the “Platform Solutions” track, but we’re hoping we can fine-tune our mix of technical talks and not-as-technical talks to make things even more valuable to the variety of attendees that will make their way to Washington DC in October (26-28).
Our track area for AstriCon 2010 are:
Asterisk Essentials – This track is focused on the specifics of how you’ve implemented some feature in Asterisk that is somewhat “self-contained”, meaning that you solved the problem with Asterisk and a minimum of external tools. Typically these will be fairly tightly focused talks around some specific method or technique you have used in your system. The focus here is on “how” – the ideal talk will reference dialplan samples, configuration files, system configuration details, and package names. If you evaluated several ways to solve a problem, let’s hear about it! What did you try that didn’t work? Imagine you’re trying to convince someone to use Asterisk instead of a closed-source product to solve some particular problem – tell the audience how you achieved your goal, and how easy or hard it was to get to completion. Examples, examples, examples! The audience wants to see your configurations, no matter how eccentric your development style.
Case Studies - More broad than the “Asterisk Essentials” track, this lineup of talks will discuss some of the business issues around using Asterisk as well as the implementations. What was the problem set your business faced? What did your business use to justify the implementation of Asterisk? What communications methods are you using? How did you configure Asterisk to provide the best value for your user community? Savings, ease-of-use, feature sets – any aspect of your use of Asterisk as to how it relates to your deployment is interesting to the audience, many of whom will discover entirely new concepts of how to use Asterisk from your examples.
Third-Party Add-Ons – Each year at AstriCon, there is visible a significant expansion of the ecosystem surrounding and connecting to Asterisk. A large amount of the value of Asterisk comes from its integration into add-on packages from both the commercial and open-source markets, and this track is focused on those elements which work in conjunction with Asterisk. As with the “Asterisk Essentials” track, it would be ideal if your talk focused on not just the general concepts of your add-on, but in fact went into the very specific details of how to configure the application for some specific goal. Providing the audience with concrete examples of how your add-on works is vitally important – without seeing screen shots, and perhaps “live” demonstrations of how the system performs it is often difficult to understand the benefits enough to come away from a talk with a strong desire to implement your add-on. Demonstrate, educate, and excite the audience with the programs you’ve connected to Asterisk!
Platform Solutions – The telecommunications space is not simply programs and hardware; it is the joining of people, equipment, and development in a way that enhances the communications experience for end users. What is your experience in selling Asterisk-based platform solutions into your market sector, and what can you share with the audience on how to be more successful? Are you creating a hybrid GSM/Asterisk platform? What is the latest in mobile device integration with Asterisk? Have you built a conferencing solution that handles video? Is your open-source telephony/screen-sharing/calendaring program using Asterisk? Describe your wide-ranging and complex solutions to the audience.
Do you have a talk topic that doesn’t quite fit one of these areas? Submit it anyway – there is always room for adjustment in our schedule, and we will always find a way for a good talk to make it into the line-up.
Please send your talk proposals to us! We’re very interested in hearing what you want to speak on, and we want this year to be another successful year of learning for speakers and participants.
Talk topic proposal form: http://www.bit.ly/speak-astricon2010
