Man, Voice-Operated Phone Menus are No Good
October 25th, 2006
I guess this is an Interaction Design thing. Have you ever called a company, let’s say…Orbitz…to have a customer service issue sorted out? And once you hit their phone’s menu system, you are prompted to say a number of choices outloud? I can see the value of this in certain situations, but I think no matter what, you should always be offered the option to press a number instead of saying your choices outloud.
Here are the problems with the outloud voice system:
- They often don’t work very well. Stating something clearly is often misunderstood by the system.
- The caller has to be in a quiet environment. Surrounding noises increase the chances that your selection will be misunderstood
- If you’re trying to make the call somewhere public, like work, saying bits of personal info outloud can compromise your privacy.
- It’s slow. With all the “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand…” error messages and slow pronounciations of words, it takes longer than pressing a button.
And the advantages of the voice operated menu system:
- They think it’s safer if you’re on the phone while driving to be able to operate this system hands-free. Guess what? Even operating a phone hands-free is totally dangerous and studies have shown even with hands-free sets, drivers using cell phones are more dangerous than drunk drivers.
- I don’t think rotary phones are around any more, last time I saw one was 1985, but if you still own one, I guess you’re in luck.
What do you guys think about these systems? Am I missing anything as far as advantages / disadvantages?
October 25th, 2006 at 12:48 pm
The fact that they are slow is the worst thing. I try to use an earpiece when I driving but I would never think of calling these places while I was driving. That would be pretty frustrating.
I always do my best to confuse the system and get bumped to a real person. It’s usually much faster than the “automated” setup.
October 25th, 2006 at 7:13 pm
I agree, I hate them.
I think I got one that worked well once, but I forget what it was for. Opting out from credit card spam maybe? I think that was it and it was very straightfoward and easy.
October 27th, 2006 at 5:07 pm
Well, I agree…I hate them as well. Seems SBC (Ameritech, AT&T, or whatever they go by today) has one of the best…sounding like and reacting like a “real” person. I still usually pound the ‘zero’ key until I am bounced to an operator. Usually this works.
The alternative and equally annoying would be the outsourced phone support…so I guess we pick our poison.
November 7th, 2006 at 11:33 am
There is at least one site that has tips on how to bypass these so-called Intelligent Voice Response (IVR) systems. I usually just mumble unintelligibly until the system dumps me to an operator.
November 30th, 2006 at 11:09 am
If you would like to hear what I think about voice operated menus say, “I’d like to hear what you think about voice operated menus”.