I've also noted before and continue to believe that many people (employees) don't like answering the telephone, and if you stop and think about it, would it make sense for the manufacturers to pay attention to their customers' employee telephone behavior?
The other ongoing argument that I do agree with and remains popular among some of the IP sales folks, is that the old TDM systems lacked training. The voicemail systems certainly made huge progress with employee mailboxes' use of tutorials. Early on, manuals would get dispersed, used and lost, and as employees changed and churned so did the knowledge base of how to use the company telephone system. I even remember competitors offering "FREE lifetime training." We all experienced the era of CDs as documentation and now we are and have been using the Web. Still, management hasn't been managing all of its resources properly, I think.
Earlier last year, a fledgling startup, Dirigo Telecommunications (renamed from DirigoSoft), tried to break into the ACD market for SMBs. Their staff had significant expertise from Rockwell International and when, I met with Jim Hunt, CEO and his folks, they brought their SMB product for demo to my office. What I do remember being cool, was the call management/call control capabilities of their system. Regardless of where you were--home, cell, office--and how you were connected to their system; all you needed to do to get help with how to handle a call was to press the * key on your dial pad. No more manuals, sticky notes, feature codes or panic attacks in remembering how to transfer, conference or do something with the telephone and the caller on the other end.
So I do think that the factory guys need to look at what Dirigo Telecommunications did that was good. Dirigo is gone, but which one of you wants to step in that line? TDM manufacturers didn't want to put web interfaces on their boxes to protect dealer revenue. In another industry, GM resisted, went so far to test and trial electric cars and then tried to mask their gross mistakes or missteps and today, Toyota is building hybrid cars as fast as they can produce them all while GM faces bankruptcy.
The parallels point to thinking that is more than flawed. So, getting more from any automated attendant and delivering a better "experience" for both the user and the caller or callee isn't something that you want to ignore. Dirigo figured it out, that improving the process right under our noses always seems to be so awkwardly obscure to the experts.
