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Wednesday, May 16, 2012
AmeriGas selects Message Technologies, Inc. (MTI) to provide hosted IVR services. With over two million customers in all 50 states, AmeriGas provides the most reliable, safest, and responsive propane service in the nation. Committed to customer service and loyalty, AmeriGas saw MTI’s IVR offering as the right tool to maintain their focus on customer service and personal attention to each customer. “We wanted to implement IVR solutions that would provide the best possible experience for our customers”, said Andrew Hertzog, Marketing Product Manager of AmeriGas. “MTI has delivered everything we were looking for in a partner.” ...
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Message Technologies, Inc.
Category: Miscellaneous
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IVR
Partner News
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Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Wow. Now I am perfectly willing to admit that I have a strong bias towards IVR applications. I design them, I evaluate them, my mortgage is paid by them, and frankly, when well designed, I absolutely prefer them to live agents. So, in full disclosure, I hereby state that I like IVR applications. And I hate them when they don’t work properly.
They get a lot of heat, deservedly so, for stiff arming the caller, providing a mechanical and obstructive interface, and obstreperously preventing efficient action on routine tasks. But today I read an article that highlights a far more ...
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Posted by:
Message Technologies, Inc.
Category: VUI Design
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best-practices
conversations
IVR
VUI design
self service applications
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Wednesday, September 22, 2010
With a growing number of enterprises looking for innovative ways to cut costs and drive additional revenue, outbound IVR has become a critical part of many business strategies. Gone are the days of unsophisticated predictive dialers, outbound IVR is becoming increasingly interactive and market data shows that the use of automated solutions is on the rise. As a result of the effective use of outbound IVR, consumers have become accustomed to receiving outbound calls and they are able to benefit from them. In our experience spanning a variety of industries, we have found that when consumers receive automated calls from ...
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Message Technologies, Inc.
Category:
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IVR
outbound
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Thursday, May 20, 2010
Recently I have been following a lively discussion on the VUID group, titled “Are we the orchestra on the Titanic?” It began with a post from the inimitable Phillip Hunter containing a link to Robert Fortner’s blog: Rest in Peas: The Unrecognized Death of Speech Recognition His premise is that the progress of automated speech recognition has peaked, and is well along the slow decline into obsolescence. Fortner cites various studies showing that the core technologies were able to take advantage of the enormous gains in hardware capability and speed, as well as the tremendous amount of text content available ...
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Posted by:
Message Technologies, Inc.
Category: Technical
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best-practices
speech recognition
VUI design
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Tuesday, December 15, 2009
All too often IVR systems get blamed for a poor user experience. The impulse to blame the user interface for a poor customer experience is common, and quick to gain traction (everyone's got a favorite IVR-flaw story). Unfortunately, many people don't take into account the type of device being used by the caller or the environment they are calling from. In general, IVR systems work very well when they are properly designed. With that being said, here are a few examples of devices and environments that are not well suited for IVR use. Enjoy. Telephone Failures
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Posted by:
Message Technologies, Inc.
Category: IVR
Tags
speech recognition
IVR
VUI design
speech technology
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Friday, November 13, 2009
A couple of months ago we dropped our traditional landline and began using the AT&T U-verse voice service. Shortly after that I discovered my wife’s unusual superpower. It started innocently enough - we chat on the phone a few times during a day. That’s normal, right? I should mention my wife is a multi-tasker and has a habit of resting the cordless phone on her shoulder as she types on a keyboard, rinses dishes, or performs an appendectomy. Often her cheek or chin would touch the keypad and voila, I would hear random touch tones. After our switch ...
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Posted by:
Message Technologies, Inc.
Category: From the CEO
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conversations
speech technology
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Thursday, August 20, 2009
A new patent has been awarded to Charles Humble of the National Institute for Truth Verification (NITV) that establishes numerical values to stress levels experienced when lying, even using recorded speech. Read the entire article here. The NITV markets the Computer Voice Stress Analyzer (CVSA I and CVSA II) , which purports to be 96%-98% accurate at discerning truth from fiction. It has been marketed primarily to law enforcement and military intelligence agencies, thus far. It uses an algorithm to analyze and graph frequency modulations in unstructured speech. These graphs then display “positively” whether the person has lied in ...
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Posted by:
Message Technologies, Inc.
Category: Technical
Tags
best-practices
speech recognition
conversations
speech technology
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Thursday, July 30, 2009
Often times when you set out to buy that shiny new or used car, things don’t go exactly as planned. In the same way, finding the right IVR hosting partner can be a tricky business. Like buying a car, if you walk into the IVR world without doing your research, you could get a lemon. It’s very important to understand some of the tricks that some IVR vendors use to get you to BUY NOW. Don’t get me wrong, not all IVR hosts are unscrupulous and not all are trying to take you to the cleaners. In fact, among all ...
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Posted by:
Message Technologies, Inc.
Category: IVR
Tags
Hosted IVR
IVR
hosted solutions
IVR-Hosting
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Saturday, July 18, 2009
Many of you have probably spent a few days or possibly even a few weeks recently, lying on your back staring at the sky. With any luck there was just a sea of never ending blueness that made you relaxed and happy to be at the beach/pool/lake/mountain top or wherever your vacation dreams reside. However I suspect that during this period of unrelenting bliss, a few clouds showed up that made you think about the future of networking computing…unless that was just me.. With all the talk of cloud computing, when you actually look at clouds you will notice ...
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Posted by:
Message Technologies, Inc.
Category: Industry News
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best-practices
Business
speech technology
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Friday, July 17, 2009
Recently a fellow VUI designer, Caroline Leathem, asked for volunteers to take a survey on outbound contact perception. You can take it here. In particular, she wanted callers from outside the U.K. to express their opinion on how they preferred to be contacted in a variety of situations. The options were: Text Message, Email, Letter, Phone Call from an Automated Service, Phone Call from an Onshore Agent and Phone Call from an Offshore Agent. The order wasn’t fixed, which I found a bit odd, as it made me wonder whether it was accidental or intended to shift the bias ...
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Posted by:
Message Technologies, Inc.
Category: VUI Design
Tags
best-practices
IVR
VUI design