Michael Cloran is the CEO of Interactions and has a wicked cool application. It is hard to explain, but essentially they are a ‘smart’ IVR system where ‘smart’ means they know when people are better at doing something than a computer; so they dump it to a human to make the decision. That so doesn’t really do it justice, but it is pretty jaw dropping in it coolness. I can’t decide if it would be really, really hard to test that or relatively simple (with a whole bunch of devil-in-the-details stuff). Anyhow, as always, here are the things I found interesting.

  • Identity theft is a serious problem in call centers. In some locations, loan sharks are known to circle call centers and then when their ‘clients’ can’t make their payments they can pay in a broken leg or in stolen identities. To prevent this, the call centers are totally paperless so you can’t write things down, but smuggled camera phones thwart this policy. Reminds me a lot of what the diamond mines used to be like in South Africa (I’m a deBeers history buff)
  • All business logic decisions handled by computer, not people. People make mistakes and are not consistent. Computers (barring the bug thing) do not.
  • The only role humans have is to determine the intent of bits of a call which the system cannot automatically determine.
  • Time delays count a lot (audio is sped up when played to the humans so the system has caught up to the speaker for real-time communication)
  • To succeed, tell a compelling story to/and solve an annoying problem
  • Game theory plays a large part of how they get the humans to be productive and invested in the system
    • The interface is like a video game where the intent analysts get points for correct interpretation
    • ‘Correct’ is determined by submitting it to more than one analyst
    • But of course some people started gaming the system by intentionally getting incorrect answers to some things when new people came on board as there was common error patterns. (slick)
    • Thus proving it’s very hard to incentivize the correct behavior
  • They didn’t know what they didn’t know which meant they made what they thought were rational decisions at the time but turned out to be not so good a couple years later. (The whole known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns thing)
  • There is never enough time to fix things later
  • Some mistakes they made
    • Not taking short pain of complete refactor
    • Lack of integrated testing carried forward
  • They use VersionOne to track stories, etc. (I had never heard of it)