Growing self service technologies
Have you noticed that when you call a large company that you almost never get a real live person quickly? I recently was calling my health insurance company to try to get information about some of the claims that they should have received and processed. I found that instead of the traditional “press 1, press 2″ prompts that I’ve become accustomed to, I was getting an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system.
My ivr customer experience was frustrating in this case because the machine could not recognize what I was saying. I think that I speak English perfectly well, but my wife says that I have a pretty thick New England accent. Very aggravating if you are supposed to speak answers into the phone and the machine on the other end keeps replying “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand your answer. Please repeat…..” I got frustrated and handed the phone to my wife, who does NOT have a New England accent. She even found herself having to repeat her answers several times for the doggone thing to go through! I think there are some improvements to be made in this kind of system!
A more exciting advance in self service technologies is the voice recognition biometric technology. This type of technology is used in security situations – it is like taking fingerprints of your voice. I think this will be a great tool in the area of banking and law enforcement! This can help law enforcement track down suspects who have gone so far as to go through plastic surgery to change their appearance!