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DATES, DOLLAR AMOUNTS, AND PHONE NUMBER PROMPTSHere are some tips to dramatically improve your prompts for date/time combinations, dollar amounts, and phone numbers, common items in interactive voice response (IVR) software. Date/Time CombinationsMost date/time combinations of interest refer to events that happened in the last week, for example, when a voicemail message was received. It's more natural to say "eight o'clock yesterday morning" or "ten fifteen tonight" than "eight o'clock a.m. on August twentieth," or "ten fifteen p.m." followed by the current date—no human being would say the full date instead of "today." Not only does a context-sensitive combination like this sound more natural, but it's easier to understand and takes less call time. The full date and time method requires 12 hour prompts, 60 minutes prompts, 2 a.m./p.m. prompts, 12 month names, and 31 days, for a total of 99. Instead, I recommend dividing each day into morning (midnight until noon), afternoon (noon until 4:59 p.m.), and night. The day is given by today, yesterday, or the day of the week. If the time is more than a week old, do you really need to give it to the exact minute? Sometimes, all the caller really needs to know in that case is that the time happened "more than a week ago." Under this system, date/time combinations become "eight twenty-three Tuesday morning," and "seven fifteen last night," much more like what you'd hear from another person. This improved method requires 12 hour prompts that are followed by minutes, 59 minutes prompts, 13 hour prompts for when the time is right on the hour, and 36 prompts for each day part (Monday, Monday morning, Monday afternoon, Monday night, today, this morning, this afternoon, tonight, etc.). Only 21 more prompts, for a total of 120. Dollar amountsFirst, let's get the pennies out of the way. You need 100 prompts: "and one cent" is the first one, and the second last is "and ninety-nine cents." They are recorded to sound like they fall at the end of the sentence. Putting the splice and the pause before "and" is less distracting than putting a splice and a pause on both sides of "and." Don't forget "even" for even dollar amounts. If you are a bank and feel the need to be extra precise, I wouldn't criticize you for recording "and no cents." If you want to be slick, you could record a version of the dollar amounts below with sentence-final intonation on the word "dollars" and let the intonation inform the caller that there are no pennies to worry about. Depending on how often you expect amounts to be under a dollar, you can record "zero dollars" or record the pennies without a leading "and." For the dollar amount, you'll need "one dollar" through "ninety-nine dollars." For larger amounts, you can get away with putting prompts like "one hundred" through "nine hundred" in front of them; you'll also need "one hundred dollars" for those round figures. It's worth doing that anyway, since round figures are quite common. If you're dealing with thousands and millions, similar principles apply. Phone numbersWe have all heard phone numbers read to us by systems that have exactly ten prompts, one for each digit. In order to make these phone numbers comprehensible, the developers have to add long pauses between each digit, and then they add even longer pauses to represent the dashes. This is not what normal people do. A minimum set of phone number prompts is 30: each digit said in a plain, continuing, and final intonation. Say 650-368-3895 out loud, and you'll notice that the 0 and the first 8—the digits before the dashes—almost sound like questions and the last 9 sounds final. It is a matter of taste whether the digit in the position of the second 8 should have rising or plain intonation. For first-rate phone numbers, you record 1,000 prompts for the three-digit area codes and prefixes (ending like a question), and two sets of 00 through 99 for the last four digits. The first has rising intonation, and the second final intonation. You may also wish to handle special cases like "one thousand" or "thirty-four hundred." Finally, a subtle point about phone numbers: if you are reading a phone number back for confirmation, you can do so much more quickly than if you are expecting a caller to copy it down. In fact, if you expect it to be copied down, you should even repeat it. But if you are only confirming, you will frustrate callers by reading it back at slow speed. You may need two sets of phone number prompts if you need to do both. |
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