Hate Talking to a Machine?

I am often asked by our customers - how do people respond when they know they are talking to a Voice Bot? This is a legitimate question, as their adoption of a technology such as Qualyon Outbounder, depends on it. Outbounder is a Conversational IVR that makes outbound calls, and transacts a sales or service task within 2 minutes.

Our analysis shows that the results are mixed. When outbound calls are made, fully 50% of the people don't pickup the call. At this point, the callee doesn't know the call came from a Voice Bot.

Keep the first interaction to less that 5 seconds

From those that do pickup the phone, their behavior depends significantly on a few factors:

• How do you introduce

• The purpose of the call

• Quality of responses

• Quality of Voice

The 3 Interactions

Ultimately, people pickup the phone because there are errands to run. But they are also trying not to be distracted from whatever they are doing. Best results are obtained by keeping the initiation (interaction-1) really small - less than 5 seconds if possible, eliciting a yes/no response.

If they see a point in continuing the conversation, it can go two different ways - either they want us to call back, or have a conversation now. Which moves us to interaction-2. It is imperative that all questions are answered intelligently. For marketing calls, there can be high drop off rates at this point.

Interaction-3 generally flows smoothly. And if you are here, then this conversational transaction has achieved its full purpose. Generally, 10% of all marketing calls, and 30% of service calls reach this point.

But what about the Robotized Voice?

Keep the voice quality as good as possible, and to less than 5 seconds, and in most cases you can move to interaction-2. Since the technology for voice quality is improving constantly, it is fast becoming a non-issue.

In conclusion

A Voice Bot operates as well as a human agent. Design your script right, and achieve the benefits of immense scale.