At last year’s G-Force in San Diego, the company unveiled its Dynamic Contact Center (DCC), bringing the contact center beyond the phone to include customer contacts that come in from the Web, email, chat, fax, text message, and any other mode imaginable. Not to be outdone, this year, its big launch is the Intelligent Customer Front Door (ICFD), taking DCC a step further to bring a level of personalization to those interactions and tying them all together through front- and back-end business processes.
In just a week or two since first announcing the solution, it has already attracted big-name partners like Nuance, TuVox, and Voxify, all lending technologies to the effort. Interest has already built among the user base as well, with Air France, Belgacom, and T-Mobile among the first to sign on.
What makes ICFD so special is that it promises to make customer service convenient, consistent, personalized, responsive, and proactive; something badly needed in an age when customers have rising expectations from their company interactions, are super-empowered with information, and have the propensity to tell the world about good or bad experiences through things like blogs (Ed: See our user reviews for proof), and social networks. Companies have no less of a responsibility to learn and know as much as they can about their customers, and can leverage that through the ICFD.
As Brian Bischoff, Genesys’ vice president of voice platform sales and solutions told me, it’s all about eliminating customer frustrations in an age when 44 percent of customers who stopped doing business with a company did so because of a bad customer contact center experience.
Gone are the days when an IVR can contain a caller. Do that, and it¹s not just ‘Click’, but ‘Click and I’m gone’. ICFD could be a just the shot in the arm I need as a customer to not only continue doing business with a company, but to also walk in the front door and do more business with the company.

San Antonio is the seventh-largest city in the United States, and the cultural gateway to the American Southwest. It’s also home to this year’s G-Force, Genesys Telecommunications’ annual customer conference. As the first day of the conference comes to a close, I can’t help but feel a sense of novelty. Compliments of Genesys, I have my first metal belt buckle (with the Genesys logo emblazoned on the front, of course), a cowboy hat, and bandana, none of which I have any idea how I’m going to get on a plane. (Ed: Wear it on the plane!)

I also took in a bullriding competition, armadillo races, and a real Texas BBQ, and probably ate more ribs in one night than I will all year. But all the cool stuff aside, there’s much more to the conference than Texas-style fun. There’s a lot of work going on as well.

With more than 1,300 attendees from all over the world, it’s the largest G-Force ever, according to the Genesys people. This year’s event has seen a large number of Latin American customers (nearly doubled from last year), indicating just how large the call center industry is growing in that part of the world. In Brazil, Internet service provider UOL is taking more than 1 million calls a month from the country’s 33.1 million Internet users, and its biggest challenge is dealing with rapid growth using outdated technologies and poor system design. It turned to Genesys to bring all its customer-facing applications (phone, email, Web chat, etc…) together, and has achieved staggering first-call resolution, proper call routing, cost reductions, worker productivity, and sales growth as a result. Unibanco, a Brazilian bank, is handling 10 million calls a month with just 6,000 agents using Genesys systems.
G-Force is an international event, and American, Canadian, European, Australian, and Asian companies are also represented in full force. The one lesson from all this: No matter where in the world it may be, call center technologies are alive, well, and thriving. From Panama to the Philippines, Rio de Janeiro to the Rio Grande, may the G-Force be with them.

Since I enjoy writing “Crushes & Hexes” so much, in the coming weeks, the blog will continue to feature breaking news updates from Ryan, while I focus only on regular features and product reviews. The newest addition to our features is “Round Up & Release,” a compilation of the biggest stories and developments from the speech tech world. While “Crushes & Hexes” focuses on the tech community as a whole, RR&R is just about speech. I hope you like it - it will appear every Thursday on the blog. As always, keep the comments coming, and send us feedback! Seriously, Ryan and I get all giddy when our readers comment. Sad but true — it’s the small things. Full post after the jump!

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It’s time for another edition of the Speech Tech blog’s regular feature, “Crushes & Hexes.” Appearing every Wednesday, we highlight companies, places, technologies, or people we deem praise-worthy, or cringe-inducing within the speech/tech/IT world. As always, your feedback is appreciated! Email us at blog@speechtechblog.com if you have a crush or hex item you’d like to see online.

Crush: MTA’s Long Island Railroad
Why We’re Loving It: I had to call the LIRR help number today to figure out how to pick up a roundtrip ticket I bought online. First, the IVR only gives you about four options, all of which are very simple (schedules, fares, tickets, etc), and makes it super-easy to transfer to an operator. I only had to wait a few minutes to talk to someone, and they immediately answered my question. No pranks today, unfortunately. I’m not letting the LIRR off the hook without a big diss, though. They’re losing MAJOR points for making their contact information insanely difficult for their customers to find (I had to Google “lirr + phone + customer service” to find the page). I’m willing to look over this fact, however, if it means I get the answer to my question in just one-and-a-half minutes. Grade: B-

Hex: Zipcar
Why We’re Hating It: In a few days, I’m moving five blocks away from my current pad, and bought a Zipcar membership to help me transfer the goods. All I wanted to do was figure out why I couldn’t reserve a car on the Web site - that’s it! First, I called their NYC office’s number. Immediately, I was told that if I was a member, I had to call a different number. Then, I called the 800-number, only to be bombarded with one of the lamest personas ever. Let’s just say that “press” sounded like “prezzzzzzzzzz.” There were only three options in the first menu, none of which related at all to what I was trying to do. I touched “3″ to “learn more about Zipcar,” but instead got bombarded with a super-long message about how to make sure my credit card payments wouldn’t be rejected. I finally heard a “press zero for an operator” and clicked away. While the operator was helpful, Zipcar MUST do something about their phone service - I had to turn my volume up full-blast to hear half of what the operator said. Grade: D

I got a phone call last week from Gilad Odinak over at Spoken Communications, in response to the blog post I wrote about the guided IVR used by Spiegel Brands and powered by Spoken. My gripe was that, when I called Spiegel to check out the IVR, all I got was a DTMF interface. Boo! I wanted to experience some guided self-service with natural language, but came up short.

Gilad told me that, at times, the Spiegel contact center and its hardware can get a bit funky — blame the network and the equipment. He said that I should try calling again, when the system wasn’t all wonky. Well, I did today and am happy to say I got to chat with “Lindsay,” the virtual agent who guided me through a few ridiculous requests I made. Here’s a transcript: (more…)

Over the past month, I have been investigating agent-assisted IVRs, and working through some of the implications the technology may have on the contact center/IVR space. Today, I decided to give them a try. One company that uses the guided IVR, Spiegel, talked to me during an interview about their experience with the IVR, which is provided by a vendor named Spoken Communications. I called up Spiegel’s toll-free number (1.800.345.4500), was greeted by a standard welcome message, given the choice of four prompts, and…..was put on hold for a live agent.

I was not expecting this! Though Spiegel owns a variety of other retail companies - I tried two others, as well - I never got to experience the company’s guided IVR. According to both Spiegel and Spoken, I would be greeted by a simple How can I help you? (natural language! yay!), but no such message popped up. So, what’s the deal? Was I horribly misinformed, or did I call the wrong Spiegel Brands company?

I really wanted to test out the guided system, but have come up empty-handed. If anyone has information about how to access the guided IVR for Spiegel, let me know. When I try it out again, I’ll be sure to post with my review. Until then, see the post below for editorial assistant Ryan Joe’s recounting of his mother’s IVR nightmare.

Let’s hope the airline in question cleans up its act! Or else face the wrath of Mrs. Joe.

When my mother books a plane ticket, she’ll voluntarily get herself bumped in exchange for a later first class ticket on a later flight, plus a free flight anywhere in the nation.

So my mother swung this little scam on a United Airlines flight from JFK to San Francisco, exchanging a 5pm departing flight for a first class flight leaving at 6am and et cetera et cetera. She bussed back to my apartment to gloat.

Too bad the 6am flight got canceled and the airline put my mother on a 7pm flight, which we didn’t learn about until we got the email at 9pm. So, time to call the airline! Yes! Own that IVR!

Except automated self-service doesn’t work particularly well with the peculiar nature of my mother’s request—that is, getting onto another flight with a first class ticket that, technically, she didn’t pay for.

“So it’s not letting me speak to an operator,” my mother said. I was looking at the Gethuman website.

“You have to actually say ‘Operator,’ I think.”

“Operator,” my mother said. “The stupid thing just transferred me to another menu. Operator. Operator. Operator. Operator. Operator! OPERATOR! Oh Christ. Op. Er. Ate. Tor.” And then she did this:

Which was kind of awesome.

It’s funny how corporations with a strong interest in high customer satisfaction still seem go out of their way to commission a labyrinthine IVR system that mostly ticks people off.

Over the course of two hours, my mother spoke with three operators. None of whom, they claimed, actually had the authority to confirm a different flight.