The Customer Service Survey
VocaLabs' weblog providing news and commentary on the challenges of providing good customer service.
Getting Human
Tuesday - August 08, 2006 07:09 AM in
Paul English, the founder of Gethuman.com, is here at the SpeechTEK conference this week. I missed his presentation yesterday (my flight didn't arrive until later in the day), but his big news is the Gethuman Earcon Standard, backed by both Nuance and Microsoft.
For those not familiar with the term, an "earcon" is the audio equivalent of an icon: a unique, identifiable sound which is associated with something meaningful to the caller.
The idea is that companies which comply with a set of customer service standards (which basically boil down to "don't hide the live service and don't be obnoxious") would be allowed to play the earcon at the beginning of the call. This would tell customers that they can reach an agent at any time by dialing zero. They even posted some ideas for earcons, though not all the recordings on the web site worked for me.
So far so good, and with both Nuance and Microsoft agreeing to promote this as a design practice, it at least has some backing.
I must admit to some skepticism about the chances of the Gethuman Earcon ever becoming widely used. The biggest problem is that the earcon itself needs to be heavily promoted in order for consumers to know what it means, and if nobody (outside a miniscule group of industry insiders) knows what it means, then no company will have an incentive to use it. It will take a couple months to finalize the Earcon standard, and I hope Paul English puts that time to good use in finding some hard dollars to get the word out.
(Not to be too cynical here, but in the meanwhile, Nuance and Microsoft both get free PR about being "good guys" and promoting quality customer service, but when push comes to shove they'll still build crummy systems if that's what their clients demand.)
I'm not entirely sold on the need for an earcon in the first place: why not just tell the caller that live service is available, rather than relying on a trendy VUI design element?
Any step forward is a good one, though, and I promise that VocaLabs will do what it can to help the cause. In our quarterly SectorPulse rankings of customer service quality rankings, we'll be sure to mention if any of the companies we rate comply with Gethuman's standards.
Posted by Peter Leppik
The idea is that companies which comply with a set of customer service standards (which basically boil down to "don't hide the live service and don't be obnoxious") would be allowed to play the earcon at the beginning of the call. This would tell customers that they can reach an agent at any time by dialing zero. They even posted some ideas for earcons, though not all the recordings on the web site worked for me.
So far so good, and with both Nuance and Microsoft agreeing to promote this as a design practice, it at least has some backing.
I must admit to some skepticism about the chances of the Gethuman Earcon ever becoming widely used. The biggest problem is that the earcon itself needs to be heavily promoted in order for consumers to know what it means, and if nobody (outside a miniscule group of industry insiders) knows what it means, then no company will have an incentive to use it. It will take a couple months to finalize the Earcon standard, and I hope Paul English puts that time to good use in finding some hard dollars to get the word out.
(Not to be too cynical here, but in the meanwhile, Nuance and Microsoft both get free PR about being "good guys" and promoting quality customer service, but when push comes to shove they'll still build crummy systems if that's what their clients demand.)
I'm not entirely sold on the need for an earcon in the first place: why not just tell the caller that live service is available, rather than relying on a trendy VUI design element?
Any step forward is a good one, though, and I promise that VocaLabs will do what it can to help the cause. In our quarterly SectorPulse rankings of customer service quality rankings, we'll be sure to mention if any of the companies we rate comply with Gethuman's standards.
Posted by Peter Leppik
Posted at 07:09 AM by | | | |