The recent issue of Business Week (3/3/2008) has an update on the “Get Human” initiative started by Paul English in 2005.
For anyone living under a rock during 2005-2006 when Paul was making the rounds of NPR and MSNBC, here’s what GetHuman is — you go to his website (www.GetHuman.com) and it lists a few hundred companies’ customer service numbers and tells you what to press or say to speak to a living, breathing person on the other end of the phone. Eureka!
After the initial novelty wore off, Get Human morphed into a proposed “standard”, with the half-hearted and opportunistic support of Nuance and Microsoft.
So here’s my take on this thing. When I read the Business Week article, I got the sense that the author (Jena McGregor) started out with a premise — Get Human is dead! – and pretty much wrote a page to support that preconceived notion.
If you actually go to GetHuman.com, you’ll see that a transformation has taken place since 2006.
Although the idea of a standard never took hold, the site now has a new focus. In addition to the IVR cheat sheet, there is a new “Consumer Rating” column, kind of like a Web 2.0 vigilante version of the Better Business Bureau.
And (hilariously), there is a column of affiliate web ads on the far right, implying that Get Human is paying its web hosting bills by driving traffic to the very companies they are exposing. Genius!
Angel.com’s Blog has an interesting take on the momentum loss of the Get Human movement. Ahmed Bouzid makes some very valid points about how the IVR/ACD vendors need to carry the flag to re-energize the campaign.
While that’s probably a sound approach, I prefer a market-driven strategy. In certain situations, people will always want to talk to a real person. Companies understand that. In other cases, the IVR is so unbelievably bad, people bail out because of sheer frustration.
Eventually, killer automation apps like the American Airlines IVR will prevail, and the lumbering old touch-tone dinosaurs will eventually die out.
And on that day, we might not need to “get human” any more.
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