Whoever designed those outbound IVRs that put you on hold should be shot

It's happened to me twice - you get a phone call, see it's from a toll-free number, decide to answer it rather than ignore it like you often do (having worked in an outbound call centre throughout University, I can appreciate that they're just people doing their job, so when I do answer it, I am always nice, but sometimes I'd rather go in their system as a "No Response"). You say "Hello?", hear the familiar pause of an outbound dialer, then hear "Due to an unusually large call volume.." in an automated voice. I generally tend to hang up laughing at that point, but I assume they're telling me to please hold for an available agent.

This has to be one of those cases where the business needs outweigh any concept of usability or usefulness. When you're doing something perceived to be as intrusive as an unsolicited outbound call, you DO NOT put your caller on hold!! It's bad enough being put on hold when you're calling them, but it's understandable, since you have no idea of the call volumes at a given time of day. When you're the one controlling the volume, as is the case with outbound calling, balance your outbound calls with the availability of agents! If something is bugged, and you're placing those calls, then find there is no available agent, I'd rather be hung up on than be put on hold - but that might be the designer in me.

We'll Miss you Mike. :(

The news was broken to us last Thursday. Our business leader, and the primary power user of AOL by Phone is no longer with the company. We're still unclear about what it means to us.

People Tend to Forget the Human Factor (but not THAT Human Factor)

1)
The prevolent dogma in Voice UI design is "Don't hide the agent!" which is very important in the initial roll out of an automated Call Centre routing system, and in the days when people weren't as used to dealing with machines as they are today, but I'm going to argue that there is another side to this - there are some people who have explicitly decided not to deal with a human being, and don't WANT to be rolled over to an agent.

This has come up in the context of a 411-deployment we've integrated with. If, after the first bit of information gathering, the set of results is too large to present in a uni-modal form, or, the first result presented to you is not the entry you were looking for, you will automatically be transferred to an operator. I don't fault them for relying on operator back up, since I cannot think of a decent, user-friendly means to present a huge list of results, but I think it should be optional. I know I hang up every time I'm threatened with it. They seem to see it as a failure of their design and implementation that they're seeing so many hangups during the transfer.

2)
People are tire kickers by nature. If you introduce a new feature to a menu, people are going to check it out, whether the feature interests them or not. On the same 411 deployment, they're also concerned about the number of people who they consider to be misdirects. That is, people who press the DTMF to go to 411, but hang up without starting a search. They seem to think it's due to their misunderstanding of what "Directory Assistance" is. Uh.. what? We've racked our brains for a more commonly used term, and cannot think of one. Anyone?