Fort Lauderdale area volunteer needed for national TV story on Get2Human.  Anyone in the Ft Lauderdals area that is interested in participating?  They are looking for people to interview that have used Get2Human and are willing to provide a soundbite about their experience with it.  If you are interested, send us your contact

Welcome to the Get2Human blog. 

The Get2Human™ movement was created from the voices of millions of consumers who want to be treated with dignity when they contact an enterprise for customer support.  Our goal is to convince enterprises that providing high quality customer service and having satisfied customers costs much less than providing low quality customer service and having unsatisfied customers. We encourage you to post your call center stories (good/bad), opinions about how call centers should operate and anything that would help enhance our gethuman database of gethumans (new companies to add or invalid Get2Humans).  It is our goal that the voice of the consumer will be heard and listened to and that automated call center systems will improve and work better for the consumers!!

The response from consumers to gethuman.com has been tremendous. People are fed up with phone systems that prevent them from getting good customer service, and are increasingly frustrated by the technology that businesses have put in place to keep them from getting to an actual human being. This web site has been a place for consumers to share information, vent frustrations, and draw attention to those businesses that provide good service options to callers, through our Great Customer Service Club.

Consumers also need to know about some of the underlying reasons why most telephone customer service is so bad. The following was sent to me by someone that believes that one of those reasons is a near-monopoly in the computer speech industry.

We all know that monopolies are bad for consumers. If the phone company was still a monopoly, we'd all be waiting weeks to have a Princess Phone installed. Cell phones would still be science fiction. Although some people think that Microsoft is a monopoly in the computer industry, if it really were a monopoly, we wouldn't have Apple laptops, iPods, and browsers from Mozilla, Google, and others. The Internet has been a boon to consumers because so small companies can easily compete to produce products to make our lives easier or more enjoyable, such as MySpace, Facebook, Amazon, eBay, etc.

Nuance Communications makes software for speech recognition, so that callers can speak to telephone systems ("Customer service please"). They also make software that allows the telephone system to speak to callers ("Your checking account balance is forty-seven dollars"). Most people hate these systems. But if done well, many people like these systems and prefer them to pressing 1 for this, 2 for that, etc. In a world of competition, lots of companies would develop these systems, and the companies that design systems that work well would succeed, and companies that produce the terrible systems that we have to deal with today would quickly go out of business.

But Nuance doesn't want competition. They've gone out and bought up most of the companies that used to compete with them. When new companies come along to compete with them, they threaten expensive lawsuits that allege infringement of their patent portfolio. Nuance isn't interested in making life easier for consumers, they just want to sell their consumer un-friendly systems. They don't invest in R&D to create better systems for consumers, they just invest in buying their competitors so they don't have to compete. This strategy is anti-consumer, anti-capitalist, and even anti-American. The result is frustrating phone systems that keep consumers from getting good customer service.

If you agree, tell the people at Nuance to stop bullying their competitors. Tell them that you want open competition. The CEO of Nuance Communications is Paul Ricci and you can email him at: paul.ricci@nuance.com

Report a company you want added to the gethuman list. Or if you see a request and know what the phone# and gethuman is, post that here.  Our researchers will find and/or validate the gethuman and add it to the database as soon as they can.

Please help us maintain the gethuman database by reporting any phone numbers and/or gethumans that do not work. (please include the name of the company!)  If you know the correct phone number and/or gethuman, please post that as well.  Our researchers will find/validate the phone# and/or gethuman and update the database as soon as possible.

Every caller to an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) System has his or her own individual set of aural, speech, hand-eye coordination (as used in DTMF keypad entry) and content comprehension skills. Add to this environmental variables such as background noise, poor mobile phone signals and caller distraction and it becomes clear that each call to the IVR System is truly a unique interaction. With regards to comprehension, research shows that the average English-speaking rate is 130 - 200 Words Per Minute. This wide WPM range applies to 90% of the English-speaking population.
 
For complex material, a rate of 130 - 145 WPM may be required
For material of average complexity, 145 - 175 WPM can be optimal
For simple material, many listeners can accommodate over 175 WPM
 
Traditional IVR applications are "static" and make no dynamic adjustments for the real-time behavior of individual callers. As a result, all callers are handled in the same way regardless of their knowledge, experience, navigation skills and willingness to use your automated system. Without "tuning in" to a callers behavior during the call, real IT efficiencies are lost.

The Adaptive Audio software technology from Interactive Digital solves these problem by allowing an existing IVR to automatically tune-in to individual caller behavior during the call. The product dynamically adjusts the Speaking Rate (in Words Per Minute) and Audio Message Content of Voice Applications in real-time based on individual caller skills. This personalizes the call experience as it happens, creating a friendlier, more efficient, more responsive and far more productive customer experience. The process emulates what humans do naturally and instinctively to communicate more effectively with each other during normal conversation.

The benefits of Adaptive Audio™ include decreased Average Handle Times (AHT) and increased Average Handle Rates (AHR) for Automated Calls, Increased IT Efficiency, reduced Telecom Costs, A Personalized Call Experience and increased Customer Satisfaction. The product is available for hosted solutions and open standards like VoiceXML and for proprietary, premise based IVR systems. Changes to the system hardware, operating system and/or application development tools are NOT required to implement Adaptive Audio and production pilots can be up and running in a very short time.

If you call an enterprise after hours, you will typically be told how really important your call is to them.  After next being informed of the precise business hours of the enterprise, you will be instructed to call back when they are open for business and it is convenient for them to talk to you.  An option to leave a call-back number or even automatically capturing the number of the calling party is rarely done. This is often the same enterprise that is spending billions of $s to “talk” to these same consumers. Yet, when the consumer is making an attempt to talk to the enterprise, the response is to tell the consumer to “go away and call us when it is more convenient for us”.  

This situation appears to be a simple break-down of communications between the enterprise marketing and call center management organizations. The basic technology to leave a message (voice mail) has been readily available for the last 25 years.  The tiniest businesses in the country routinely do this.  If you call them after hours, you can leave a voice mail and someone will call you back next day.  Just capturing the number of the caller solves the problem most of the time and using CallerID would accomplish this.  The enterprise would still need to pull off the numbers from the messaging system.  This would seem like an opportunity for the vendors to provide a service that makes this easy to do.  Automation of the pulling of the caller’s contact information would seem like the primary thing that is needed.  The enterprise would still need to have a CSR call back the consumer.  The call-back service would then automatically call the customer and connect to CSRs as the are available.

During the last few years, many enterprises have moved their call centers to regions of the world where the labor cost is much lower.  This has reduced the cost of providing customer service to callers.  Unfortunately, the customer service representatives (CSRs) do not speak English very well.  In fact, they often have such severe accents that they are virtually impossible to understand.  They, in turn, have difficulty understanding what the caller is saying.  This situation makes communication difficult and often impossible. 

One of the gethuman standards states: All operators/representatives of the organization should be able to communicate clearly with the caller (i.e. accents should not hinder communication; representatives should have excellent diction and enunciation.)

From the number of complaints that we receive each month on this topic, it is clear that very few of the overseas-based call centers are meeting this requirement. 

What should be done about this?  We would be interested in hearing some ideas on dealing with this.  One approach would be to identify the enterprises that are using off-shore call centers where their CSRs do not communicate well.  We've added an item to the gethuman customer rating form that would let us obtain this information.  With this data, we would then be able to identify the enterprises that are using CSRs that are difficult to understand, and let them know that they have a problem that they need to fix. 

Tell us about any horror stories you have had with companies that are not on the gethuman list.  For the gethuman listed companies, you should just click on the name of the company and you will be able to share your experience with us.  We will use this information to let these companies know about what they are doing.  It is our hope that companies will use this information to improve their call centers when they read about what consumers feel are "horrible" call center characteristics.  In the next months, we will be giving prizes to the best stories that are submitted.