The devil in disguise?

Last week I found myself trawling around various contact centre blog sites (here for example) and was quite surprised by the wide apprehension there still appears to be about the use of interactive technologies such as speech recognition and biometric speaker verification.

Actually, that's not really too surprising when you consider that many people still have a shrink-wrapped set-in-stone cast-iron opinion that basic touch-tone IVR is the devil in disguise. IVR can be done "right", but it so often isn't that it's no wonder people view something that's an order of magnitude (or even two) more expensive as being a significant risk.

I look at numerous business cases where the projected financial return on investment shows little if any acknowledgement of the fact that user adoption may be anything less than monumental. Spectacular uptake and adoption; people will call the service just because its fun. Nonsense. People change their behavior very seldom, and when they're "forced to" it can be uncomfortable.

There will always be a bell-curve of user adoption, and a temporal scale that shows a change of user behaviour (and ideally acceptance) over time. It's not rocket science to understand, and it will "scare" some people who chose not to pull back the covers, but talking about the potential business gains of technology is just not enough.

Not only is it not enough, it's simply not representative of the real world that we live in. Until people start to experiment with the application of technology, on real users, and openly discuss their positive and negative experiences - well, we simply won't get anywhere fast.

There is a time and a place for technology. More, there's a personal time and a place for technology, and understanding how to personalise system behaviour to meet individual peoples expectations and aspirations for service is a key to unlocking the true business benefit.

That's why we think our Concept Lab is such a great idea!