IVR Deconstructed

Oh Mark Zuckerberg, you are always a simultaneously reassuring and eloquent CEO.  The above quote is an actual statement from Zuckerberg (professional, right?) regarding the Federal Trade Commission suit that was brought against Facebook regarding the many privacy violations the site has perpetrated.

The FTC is no joke.  Established about a century ago the commission operates as an agency of the federal government to ensure consumer protection and prevent deceptive and unfair acts towards consumers.

So what, in brief, were the specific objections cited in the suit that the commission brought against Facebook?  Sharing users’ personal information with third parties without their knowledge or consent, changing privacy practices without informing users thus making information designated as private public, promising users they won’t share personal information with advertisers then sharing it anyway, and allowing access to information and data from deleted or deactivated accounts when they claimed that it would be inaccessible.

Wait, what?  Why are millions of people still using this site?  Think for a moment if this happened at any other company.  What if Google made public users’ information and also sold it off to advertisers while explicitly promising not to?  What if IVR companies made updates to their systems without informing clients about sweeping changes that could affect their personal or professional lives?  What if a retail website like Amazon decided to share user’s purchase history and also sell details of purchaser’s buying habits to market research firms.  Everybody would be up in arms, the business would be in serious hot water, the company would be in blatant violation of several laws, and there would be massive repercussions.

And what happened to Facebook?  Basically a slap on the wrist.  They have to “make sure” that they fix all of the privacy loopholes on the site, establish a privacy program, and every two years for the next 20 year obtain third-party audits of the privacy program.  They are basically getting away with murder, and not because the FTC hasn’t tried to curb and reverse these egregious privacy violations, but because each and every user who uses site continues to enable them.

I have mentioned plenty of times that I no longer have a Facebook account (primarily because I figure that anyone worth my time to talk to deserves an email, a phone call, or even a nice hand written letter), but why is everyone else still accessing this site and uploading massive amounts of their personal data to a site that clearly has little or no respect for individual privacy?  The above mentioned violations aren’t just mistakes, they are flagrant violations of consumer’s rights without their knowledge or consent.

But don’t worry frequent Facebook users, Mark Zuckerberg has appointed not one but TWO privacy offers to make sure that the millions upon millions of data packets they collect and store from users worldwide is being treated with the utmost care.

So perhaps in this day and age where everything happens instantaneously at the touch of a button, Facebook users should do a serious cost-benefit analysis before continuing to use the site.  Just because you can do something easily, does it mean you should?  Facebook’s commitment to privacy remains to be seen, but the site’s credibility has most certainly been damaged.  But will millions of users all over the world take heed?  Only time will tell…

Honestly, there are other big stories in the press right now that disgust me—or, rather, the people they’re about disgust me.

But I’m too disgusted to write about them, so it’s trickled down to the Fukushima Daiichi power plant disaster (which I’m slightly less disgusted by, although still disgusted).

The Guardian newspaper is reporting today that officials from Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), operators of the Fukushima Daiichi plant, ignored warnings from a 2008 internal report saying that the plant would be at danger from a tsunami of 10 meters or higher.

According to the Kyodo news agency, Tepco officials dismissed the report, calling it “unrealistic.” They decided against bolstering protection at the plant against seawater flooding.

If I had to guess, I’d wager Tepco had engineers on one side of the table telling them they needed to build expensive barriers, and they had accountants on the other side of the table telling them how the expensive barriers would hurt their bottom line.

It’s just speculation, but isn’t that normally how these things go? Cost is always a concern, whether it’s a seawall for a nuclear power plant or an airshaft for a mine.

(Mines need airshafts to release explosive methane gas, which is lighter than air. Many early mines didn’t spring for the airshafts because of cost, leading to unnecessary explosions and the deaths of miners.)

But weighing cost when it comes to safety is a risky venture. Cost certainly doesn’t come into play for the Japanese affected by Fukushima’s meltdown, or for the Ukrainians with cancer from Chernobyl.

According to the Huffington Post, experts are saying that contamination levels in Fukushima were low and may not affect anyone. Some experts are saying that initial studies are promising. But others are saying they expect a few thousand cases of thyroid cancer in particular from the radiation.

We have been consistently reminded of the fact that Christmas is upon us since well before even Halloween (at least it feels that way).  Retailers and those who market for them seem to push forward the “start date” of the holiday season every year.  For those of who don’t want to celebrate Christmas for a quarter of the year, the holiday shopping season typically begins the Friday after Thanksgiving on “Black Friday”.

Most retailers open extremely early and offer huge discounts for those who arrive in store.  The day is typically marked by frantic attempts on the part of shoppers to snag the items they really want, which are finite in number and available at a deep discount.  The term has been around for almost half a century and has been used to describe the shopping rush that kicks off retailers’ Christmas season.

For the last six years or so (according to Mashable), the Monday after Black Friday has become known as Cyber Monday.  Cyber Monday is the busiest shopping day of the year for online retailers, with consumers taking part in the massive discounts offered online.  The term was only coined in 2005 when a slew of retailers noticed that their sales increased exponentially through their online storefronts, specifically on the Monday after Thanksgiving.

Last year actually saw the first ever billion-dollar online shopping day in the United States.  What are some of the reasons for this huge surge in online retail activity on this specific Monday?

According to Shop.org, the massive increase in online sales could be explained by the fact that those participating in online shopping have much faster and more secure Internet connections at work.  Shoppers also might not have had the opportunity to get their shopping done over the extended holiday weekend and want to finish promptly.

In 2010, 88% of online merchants offered Cyber Monday discounts to customers, 63% had special email campaigns and 22% offered free shipping.  People also purchase products from fairly specific retailers on Cyber Monday, with jewelry, consumer electronics, food & beverage, and furniture retailers seeing the largest percentage increase in their sales.

In just six short years after the term was first used, everyone is attempting to capitalize on the phenomena with retailers getting extremely creative in their marketing campaigns.  Some retailers started Cyber Monday early, with what they titled Merry Monday (the Monday before Thanksgiving, Sofa Sunday (the Sunday after Thanksgiving meant for people laying on their couch to access online stores via their tablet), and Mobile Sunday (the highest grossing day of the holiday retail reason for consumers making purchases on their mobile).

Regardless of what you think about the oversaturation of Christmas-themed marketing, there is surely a deal out there for everyone.  But how about people who can’t access the Internet at home or work, those who don’t sit in front of a computer all day, and those who have slower Internet than bandwidth shopping sites require to complete a transaction?

Perhaps the IVR providers of the world should unite to set up a new marketing holiday—IVR Tuesday—where everyone calls in from their landline, mobile, work phone or pay phone (if you can actually find one) to place their orders.  This would not only make purchasing available to an even larger demographic of people but would offer a more personal experience, one-on-one with a retail associate,

While phone ordering is certainly not the new thing, retailers would do well to acknowledge that a vast majority of the population has access to phone lines, even more so than those with Internet connections. 

I know President Obama.  I also know Leonardo DiCaprio, Thom Yorke and J.K. Rowling.  The theory of six degrees of separation postulates that everyone is on average around six steps, by way of introduction, to any other person on earth.  Two people anywhere in the world can theoretically be connected (via introduction) to anyone else in six steps or fewer.  The point of the ‘six degrees’ theory is to demonstrate that the world and the connections people establish and maintain within it are much closer than previously supposed.

The Small World Experiment, conducted by Stanley Milgram starting in 1967, was intended to explain the idea that the world was becoming increasingly interconnected.  Milgram sought to study the hypothesis that two randomly selected people would know each other.  He specifically confined his study to the United States, selecting random individuals from Omaha and Wichita as starting points and individuals from Boston as end points.

Milgram sent packets with information to the randomly selected starting individuals with a specified (randomly selected) ending contact in Boston.  The starting person signed their name on a roster and forwarded it along to a friend, relative or acquaintance that was more likely to know the person in question.  Researchers would then track the progression of the roster and use it to discern how many numbers of times it took to reach the end point from the starting point.

Facebook has just released data from a similar type of study (using their own data culled directly from their website), and have suggested that people are separated from one another by on average less than five connections (with the exact number coming in on average at 4.74).  Facebook utilized the data from the friend networks of 721 million people, which is estimated to be about a tenth of the world’s population.  Data was crunched using super computers and the results were released, updating statics from three years ago that suggested that people were separated by an average of 5.28 degrees in 2008.

Bear in mind that these were in fact worldwide statistics.  Statistics examining the connections between people living in the same country suggested that people living in the same country are separated from one another by an average of only three connections.

While this certainly shows that the world is getting smaller for some individuals (between the tech savvy, those who have access to Facebook and those who utilize the site frequently), I can’t help but think that this data is somewhat skewed.  Data for this study was collected not from random members of the population, but from those who had the access to technology to establish and often times maintain a Facebook account.

On top of that, this was an opt-in service, so what about the people who don’t want to use Facebook for various reasons?  Plenty of social butterflies out there do not use Facebook, and there are plenty of other people who would not have that many connections.  Can the results truly be accurate if the study is only representative of a specific sector of the population?

Regardless of how representative these results are of the global population, they are a testament to technology’s power to connect people and are evidence for the fact that it really is a small world after all.

You know what the difference between a call center that only has live agents and one that has an IVR system as well? It’s the difference between regular traffic and holiday traffic.

I drove into work this morning from Boulder to Denver, which I don’t normally do. Usually I take the bus so I can read or catch a little catnap or whatever. The bus can go in the HOV lanes, obviously, so it’s also a little faster.

The days I’ve driven in with normal traffic loads have been a hassle. Boulder is about 30 miles from Denver along a major commuting freeway. Lots of people who live in Boulder commute to Denver for work, so traffic gets heavy at times.

Things start to get pretty bad when you get close to Denver. During normal rush hour, you slow to a crawl for the last few miles. Which is why I definitely prefer to take the bus.

But not this week. Why? Because it’s a holiday week, and the rules are completely different. Even yesterday people were out of town already so traffic was lighter, and it’s only getting lighter as the week goes on. Tomorrow ought to be a breeze.

So today, instead of sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic the last few miles into Denver, I just cruised right in. You gotta love holiday traffic.

And it’s the same thing with call centers. Ones without an IVR are normal traffic—it usually takes a while to get someone on the phone because you have to wait in a call queue (unless you’re calling at one in the morning). Often you have to wait for five minutes, ten minutes, twenty minutes…

Not so with an IVR. Automated call answering means no call queues. An IVR has virtually unlimited lines, so it can take every call it receives first time. After that, it can take care of most calls itself, but if it can’t it’ll send you on to a call agent.

IVRs are the holiday traffics of the call center world. Easier, faster, way less stressful. Like I said, you gotta love holiday traffic.