Application Design

• Attempt to match CallerID. - If your know who's calling, why not greet accordingly? Think of the first prompt of your application as an opportunity to impress and a chance to direct.
  
• Don't prompt for information you already know - Once you've identified the caller, you may be tempted to keep the application simple by not sharing state information between scripts. However, asking the same question twice annoys the hell out of callers, so think about the cost of doing this. Instead, you can use Variables and Session cookies to share key information between pieces of business logic.
  
• Log and recover from incomplete transactions - The phone is a 'mostly unconnected' medium. That means your callers are not generally connected to the application, and when they are, they could become easily disconnected (another incoming call, boss interruption, flaky cell phone connection). This will lead to incomplete transactions. For example, let's say your application is a change of status line. You may need to collect five pieces of information before you can change the status. The customer calls, answers three, then the call is dropped. You could make the customer start from scratch next time they call, but why? Instead, personalize the caller experience and prompt them to recover from what they were doing before ("I noticed you called earlier to change your status. Shall we continue?"). Angel can help implement this behavior with Hang Up Transaction Pages, as they have guaranteed execution.

Get to the point
If you hear a call center manager say 'we need to get to the point with our customers,' he's probably looking at his average cost per call. Many IVR systems are poorly designed (I'm sure yours isn't :-) and as a result force callers to spend valuable seconds just listening to prompts and menus they don't need to hear.

When you design a 'get to the point' Voice Site, you are thinking hard about the call flow and only presenting the minimum set of relevant options to the caller. Options should be ordered in a manner that places the most useful choices to callers at the beginning.

Another source of time waste is poorly or rigidly worded questions. These 'black spots' in a design will usually yield a higher rate of user errors and a lower rate of task completion.

Angel can help in a variety of ways:

• Design dynamic menus through Variables and Transaction Pages. For example, make the home page of your Voice Site a transaction page that sends CallerID to your server, then return a series of variables representing the prompts for the main menu. That way you'll only play menu options relevant to the current caller.
  
• Make good use of Site Usage Reports. These documents keep track of how callers use your Voice Site. They can give you good insight into which paths callers are taking.
  
• Use Transactions to define Task Completions. What are the significant points in your application (e.g. - order item, check out, credit card accepted, etc.). If you report on these back to your system, you will be able to get a picture of how your Voice Sites are performing. This will help in the next iteration of your design.
  
• Handle less-than-perfect response scenarios through a variety of mechanisms:
  
  • Number + Keyword Question Pages allow you to ask questions such as: "On any given month, how often do you stay with us?" and collect answers like "never," "once a month," or "5 times." By asking the question in a way that the caller would expect (instead of "Please say the number of times per month that you stay with us."), you elicit a response that comes out naturally, and doesn't require further thinking from the caller.
    
  • Response Filtering enables you to weed out 'filler' words from responses, and capture just the part you're interested in. For example: "What car do you drive?" could be answered with: "a Honda," "I drive a Honda," or "Er... It's a Honda Accord" and you could capture just the "Honda" part. There's new advanced syntax available in Site Builder that will enable you to mark certain things as optional or for rejection. You can have it enabled by sending a Support request through the Support Center.
    
  • Threshold tuning, a part of the ASR Settings pack, allows you to instruct Angel about the confidence levels (certainty) needed to handle caller responses. There are two levels you can play with: confidencelevel and confirmationthreshold. The former determines how confident should the system be before it rejects the response as out of context (no match). The latter instructs the system on how good a response should be before it bypasses confirmation altogether. By changing these parameters you can ensure your high-confidence callers are zooming through the application, while still taking care of less-than-perfect responses.

Pick your best player
If you hear a call center manager say 'when a call comes in, you need to pick your best player', he's probably referring to how you select which agent the call will go to. Maybe in the past you've had an 'agent from hell' experience, where an agent had very little clue of how to deal with your problem, and just wasted a lot of time to get it resolved.

In the past you would need an expensive ACD (Automatic Call Distributor) system to address this issue that would handle monitoring the status of agents and matching their skills to those required to handle incoming calls.

With Site Builder, Angel can do this for you, and save you tons of money in the process. Through the Call Queue Page, you can now distribute calls based on a number of parameters. For example, if you pick "Skills-based routing" you can first filter available agents based on whether they possess a skill requested by the caller or inferred by the IVR as it handled the automated leg of the call (E.g. 'agent must speak Portuguese' or 'can handle support inquiries about product x'). You can then use a load-balancing algorithm, such as 'Least Occupied Agent' to discern what agent the system should select before transferring.

This ensures that the 'best available player' is handling the call. Bliss for your manager, brownie points for you!

Don't fly blind
If you hear a call center manager say 'our agents are flying blind' he's probably referring to the fact that your agents know about the caller when the call is picked up. Or, even worse, your IVR system knows about the caller but is incapable of communicating to the agent what they need to know to answer effectively.

The traditional approach to this conundrum involves expensive CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) systems. If you have a few hundred thousand dollars to spare, CTI systems are a viable option. But, if you're in the same boat as most IT managers, you probably have a tight budget.

Angel can help you deliver a great solution with very little work. Here's two common approaches:

• Call Screen Pops: when transferring the call, use the new Call Screen functionality to 'whisper' to the agent the information needed to provide good service. For example, you could design an audible pop that says:
  
  

  "You have a call from Sam Aparicio, Customer ID 3489, he has a problem with: Microsoft Word, and has been on the line for less than 2 minutes. Ready to connect?" (parts in italics are SmartPlay prompts).

  This gives the agent all the information to greet me:

  "Good evening Mr. Aparicio, I see you have a problem with your word processor, thank you for holding, let me pull up a troubleshooter here for you..."

• Computer Screen Pops: if you have an existing web-based CRM system, you can make use of a Transaction Pages prior to a Call Transfer Page to call on a script that looks up the IP of the computer of the agent receiving the call, to then generate a message to that computer (HTTP Push, IM / Jabber, etc). Since Angel is standards based, the possibilities for integration are endless, as you can reuse the stack of Web standards to your advantage. I'd be happy to share more specifics of some customer projects where this has been done.