Taking the rap
"Fancy-pants" speech technology gets the blame for... a database failure?
Paul McNamara, an editor at Network World, recently blogged about a couple of calls he made to his healthcare provider's customer service, which is fronted by a speech recognition system. The dialog could have had fewer questions, but by his own account, the speech recognition worked flawlessly both times. The back-end transactional systems seems to have been down at the time of his calls, however, and when he was routed to an agent, they asked him to call back later.
But Paul entitles his post IVR hell: 'Oh, great, NOW you tell me' and describes the system as one of those fancy-pants IVR systems that utilize voice recognition technology. The comments have been quick to blame IVR systems in general.
To his credit, Paul isn't totally negative (When these things work well they're a modern-day marvel...), and the real basis of his complaint is more about the re-entry of the same information multiple times than having to deal with an automated system.
But the impulse to blame the user interface technology for a poor customer experience is common, and quick to gain real-world traction (everyone's got a favourite IVR-flaw story; the GetHuman movement is building a monument to it).
Maybe it's natural. Let's say I want to make a withdrawal from an ATM machine and it tells me it has no money (yes, the time-honored ATM analogy...) My initial reaction is to blame the machine, and not the guy who was supposed to come and fill up the cash yesterday. Why? Because my direct interface with my money is the ATM machine and not the bank's processes for keeping the ATMs full?
Or because "stupid machine" is such an easy response?
