I just finished reading Michelle Goodall Faulkner’s article in CRM Daily, “When Getting Human isn’t Enough," in which she pretty succinctly lays out what she terms the “comprehensive approach to the design and deployment of customer-facing applications in the contact center.” She brings up the downside of self-service applications that lead to caller frustration such as misrouted calls, hang-ups, and other factors such as those tediously long menus that we all suffer through when companies fail to apply best practices to IVR design. Which, I might add, after 20+ years of IVR deployments, there is just no excuse for, but I digress.

The gist of her article however is on testing, and here she lays out the three main components of testing a customer service application – usability testing, automated functional testing (AFT) and load testing. She also references the 10 “standards” for application and design testing detailed in gethuman standard v1.0 on Paul English’s Get Human web site.

I agree with Michelle. Testing is everything and it should be done before deployment, not after you use your customers as guinea pigs.

Regrettably, SpeechTek and VoiceCon overlap 100% on the days they are being held this year. Since I cover the same areas that both these shows do, my decision to go to VoiceCon, instead of SpeechTek, is based entirely on the formula of “pay lots of money to fly to New York for four days, or sleep in my own bed and drive to San Francisco.” All I can say now, is “oh rats!”, as Syntellect put out a press release Tuesday about having a sneak peek at a new product they are introducing, that alleges to solve many of the issues I brought up in my testing blog last week.

Here is an update on a startup company in the UK that I’ve been following for a year now, and a few of you may know about. Well worth checking into, VoxIQ provides an enabling technology to the contact center market that combines speech technologies and knowledge databases to assist live agents in providing the best customer service and satisfaction possible - and they do it really fast. The key to VoxIQ’s uniqueness is in the combination of speech recognition and the use of knowledge databases. Many companies use speech recognition or speech analytics to improve agent performance, or knowledge-based systems (KBS) to assist agents, but VoxIQ uses them in tandem, to provide dynamic database information to the agent in real-time as the conversation progresses with the caller.

In case you aren’t familiar with Voxify, they are one of the pioneers in the use of speech-recognition-driven automated agents in contact centers. With customers like Hammacher Schlemmer in retail and Red Lion Hotels in hospitality, Voxify agents have really taken automation in the contact center to a different level. Since coming out with these speech-enabled agents Voxify has made regular updates to the product, so I was thinking that maybe their next move would be to add some sort of speech analytics or knowledge database-driven capability to their agents, but not this round. Instead, they surprised me by announcing two other things at SpeechTEK – allowing customers to deploy their solution on-premise, instead of or in addition to the hosted solution that they have been providing, and enabling contact center managers to change routing and scripting of self-service call flows dynamically.

OK, OK. I know I should be blogging about what I saw at VoiceCon and heard about at SpeechTek, but I’m not done yet. Besides, it’s no fun to work all the time. I have found two little call center nuggets to pass on though. Just for fun, I have to post this. I was cruising MSNBC.com and saw a story “The Worst Boss in America” which is a contest recently finished on the web site Working America.org. Surprise! One of the top two winners was a call center help desk story, and one of the 20 runner-ups was about a call center. In between picking up my slack jaw from my knees, I was either laughing or shocked. Like a slow moving horror movie, I just couldn’t stop reading. Check it out and be happy you work where you do.

Although I wasn’t able to attend SpeechTek last week in New York, I did talk to a number of people who were there, along some of the vendors who were exhibiting. Based on the show floor and announcements this month, the industry has made a lot of headway into automated customer support, mobile applications, and entrance into emerging markets, such as unified communications. Here is fraction of what I missed.