If you’ve been lucky enough to avoid them, the typical experience with an IVR is this: user calls up, IVR asks for various pieces of information, inevitably routes the call to a real operator, and the operator asks for the exact same information.  Very often this is several pieces of information, not just an ID number. The user is already angry/depressed about his broken/missing/overpriced widget (which is why he is calling in the first place), and right out of the gate you’re asking him to waste more of his time repeating himself. Yes, it’s almost as wonderful as it sounds.

I had occassion to call American Airlines recently to complete purchase of an itinerary I’d set up on the website.  We had some vouchers to cash in, thanks to getting totally screwed up on the way to Halifax.  Evidently the web architects at AA decided it was too hard to cash in/authenticate those over the web.  [If Coinstar/Amazon can dole out and redeem cash vouchers worth up to $500, why can't American Airlines?  Just another case of a ragtag bunch of misfits overcoming incredible odds?]

Anyhow: IVR asked me what I wanted to do. I said “purchase”. It asked for my date of travel, and then what flight, and then my name.  When I said my name, it responded, “I think you said, ‘–avadia’, starting with: ‘T A V A’. Is that right?”  At this point I started to wonder if it was actually going to take my credit card number and cut the human out of the loop entirely!  But no, it transferred me to “Diane” (who was probably human, but was kind of weird and awkward, so I’ll never be sure.)  But HEY!  The IVR sent all my data on, and Diane didn’t have to ‘confirm’ any of it!  Sweeeeeet!

Takeaway: more companies should spring for the Registered Shareware version of whatever IVR system they’re all using, like American did.  Cynical takeaway: the “pass on the info” feature was finally added in version 6, and IVR systems have been sold into corporations all these years without anyone ever asking where they save time.