OK, here is the thing with voice menu systems. AND if you want to blame me for some of it, go ahead. I installed and programmed a lot of them "back in the day"
The thing is, they CAN solve a lot of "nuisance calls", which if the truth was told, A lot if not MOST of our calls to a business fall in to this category. They can free up personnel, and personal are what costs money. Salary, health insurance, sick days, maternity leave, etc. People cost money, and a lot of it. Machines may seem high to purchase, but once purchased and installed, most of them operate pretty cheap afterwords. Seeing how most things now-a-days run on standard servers, which you provide and are just software applications, they are easy to fix and replace if something happens to them.
Those calls that cannot be solved by a machine are routed to a ACD(Automatic Call Distributor), and yes, I set up a lot of those too. These are the pool of "trained" operators, standing by. The ACD makes sure it is working the operators at full capacity ALL of the time. No sitting around picking of noses or looking at their nails. They are full bore all of the time, and I would set up the automatic reports and if necessary translate those reports manually to the owners of the business or sell then another piece of software to run on a PC to make the reports into a format that the wanted and could understand.
Reports are to make sure that they don't have too many "agents" in the ACD group, (wasting money)or not enough (pixxing off customers) and that each "agent" is pulling his or her weight.
SO, get out your knives and call me dirty names or send cruise missiles my way. I am (was) the cause of more than a few of these system sold, installed, and maintained.
Of course a lot of this is "old hat" and more sophisticated self service systems are web based, and not so much voiced/phone based. IF possible you should never call customer service if their web based customer self service will do the job.
What is REALLY maddening is for me to call one of the systems that might still be in operation that I actually put in place. NOW that really pixxes me off. Of course that is happening less and less. My actual voice was on many of these systems, but I run into it less and less as the years go by.
ing computers!"
