Colin Calnan.com

Call-center’s can be source of frustration for all of us. Its seems like every call center in the Western World has taken the path of replacing people with voice automation or have outsourced to a warehouse of university students somewhere in India. If you live in anywhere in Canada, outside Quebec, you know the golden rule when calling any system that has an automated response; Press 1 for English. This can be the start of a long process of listening to all the options available before making a choice. If it’s a service you call often, you can learn the steps and bypass the long list of options. However, almost as if they’re trying to keep you on the phone, every once in a while you hear the lovely little message “We’ve recently changed how our service works”.

Translink

Recently I was waiting at a bus stop at 1am. With no time table on my person, none available at the stop, being in a not so great part of town, not sure if I had missed the last bus, and considering calling or hailing a taxi, I remembered that translink had a phone number on every bus stop sign for inquiries. Given the time, the usual office closed response was expected. Not so. One of the first few options allowed entering your bus stop number to get the next bus times for that stop. Choosing that option, and looking up at the bus stop sign, punched in the 5 digit number and boom, a nice automated lady read back my location and the next three bus times at my stop, 1:05am, 1:22am and 1:53am. And what would you know, about 2 minutes later a bus rolled up to the stop, bang on 1:05am. Translink itself provides a great public transport service and now it’s customer service is also improving. The speed with which times could be retrieved from the moment of connection was outstanding. The options were clear, there was no ambiguity and I got what I wanted.

Voice User Interface (VUI)

In addition to systems which allow you to input commands via the keypad of your phone, there also exists systems which allow you to speak your command. Telus in Canada has this service. Personally I find these disconcerting, particularly in an environment where you want to be discreet about your information, or else don’t feel comfortable reading out your bill number or password, or pin number.

As with Graphical User Interface’s (GUI’s), there are bad examples and good examples as well as guidelines for the development of such interfaces. A previous presentation at Vancouver User Experience Group by Paul Sherman went through the process involved in improving such a service - get PDF of that presentation.

Needless to say Translink’s service was impressive and I will definitely use it again in the near future to find out the time the next bus is due to roll along.