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Telephone self-service is able to provide real value to consumers. It makes access to information available 24/7. It is available without waiting in line. Consumers can purchase things. They can check availability. They can check the status of an order. They can obtain directions. In addition to making customers happy, telephone self-service is also able to save money for the enterprise that is providing it.

Unfortunately, this situation is rarely achieved. Telephone self-service is intensely disliked by many consumers because it is implemented very badly. The caller wants a quick & easy experience and most telephone self-service instead provides an experience that is slow & difficult.

Table 1 summarizes the results of this testing. We have adapted the www.gethuman.com Voice User Interface (VUI) Standard as the basis for our evaluation. The scoring/rating scheme is simple to understand and scoring of a particular VUI is relatively easy to do. All that is needed is to make a phone call and observe how the system responds. The scheme that we are using has some obvious limitations. The fact that we give each item equal weight is certainly arguable. On the other hand, despite its simplicity, it appears to yield results that seem to correlate with the relative goodness of the self-service system.