Outbound
Persona Development
Benefits
The persona can be thought of as the personality of your IVR application. It represents the personification of human-like characteristics which either emerge spontaneously from the application or are overtly stated (for example by the IVR system introducing itself by name). It’s the embodiment of how your callers think of your IVR, and it is the voice of the system in every sense. It’s comprised of a number of factors, including:
- Voice Talent – tonal qualities and regional accent
- Coaching – pace, intonation, emotion (e.g., helpful, apologetic, serious, etc.)
- Audio Quality – professional voice talent recorded in a professional setting
- Style – word choice and grammar of the prompting
Since, by their nature, speech applications are conversational, they tend to be anthropomorphized by their users. Thus, every system may be said to have a persona, whether or not by design.
Description
We’ll help you leverage this conversational relationship between your IVR and your users by carefully crafting your persona to provide your callers with a satisfying call experience that embodies your organization's brand.
To determine what persona is right for your IVR, we’ll examine your business needs, the needs of your end users and how you want to project your brand.
The PTP Persona Development service offering is conducted in three phases: Kickoff and Research, Design and Test.
Kickoff and Research Phase
This phase lasts from three to five days, and is conducted onsite at your Contact Center. It includes the following activities:
Analyze Calls
- Who are the callers?
- Why are they calling? Are callers unable or unwilling to get customer service online? Which issues are self-serviceable within the IVR?
- What tasks are they trying to accomplish? Are most tasks those that can be accomplished by automation (like resetting a password)? Or, do they require the assistance of an agent (like resolving a dispute)?
Define Business Goals
- Work with the project's stakeholders
- What should the IVR do?
What new self-service offerings can we add? Are there new FAQs we should add, or old ones we can remove? - How are the following ranked?
- Self Service
- Call Routing
- Customer Service
- Differentiation in Marketplace
- "Cool" Factor
Define the IVR Brand
- Work with your marketing and business teams
- What adjectives define your brand?
- Trustworthy
- Secure
- Reliable
- Others
- Overt vs. Emergent persona: which fits your brand better?
Design Phase
This phase lasts from two to three weeks and includes the following activities:
Create Caller Profiles
- To make sure we’re keeping the caller’s perspective in mind, we’ll create a number of written biographies of a few fictitious people who represent your typical callers.
- The Profiles represent some of the most common “caller types,” and they include information about who the callers are, why they are calling, and how they interact with your organization.
- These Profiles will represent the voice of your caller, and will help us tailor the persona to them.
Create System Persona Draft
- We will create a written description of the persona of the system, describing its sound and feel, personality, and vocal qualities.
- This serves as a guideline for the Example Call Interactions which will be rated by your users in an online Focus Group
Create System Style Guide
- A document that contains a description of how the UI will “talk”.
- A combination of speech IVR best practices and the tailored diction that will be reflected with your persona.
Audition Voice Talent
- We create professional audio files of a variety of voiceover actors who fit the persona type that we define.
- We direct the voice talent in the studio to most effectively project the characteristics of the persona.
Create Audio Example Call Interactions
- We’ll create an audio file of each sample interaction, to serve as the audition for each voice talent.
- These will be rated by the focus group participants.
Test Phase
In the Test Phase we’ll systematically elicit users’ feedback on the selection of the voice talent and evaluate their reactions to the persona and to their call experience. The Test Phase of Persona Development is conducted in parallel with the Development and Deployment phases of the IVR application. It includes the following activities:
Online Focus Groups
- Recruit participants who fit the your caller demographics to take part in an online focus group
- Participants answer a survey which elicits their feedback on their expectations of your organization's brand, ranking adjectives in importance (friendly, knowledgeable, businesslike, trustworthy, etc.)
- Participants then listen to the recorded audition files, listening to and rating each voice talent
- We incorporate participants’ feedback into the final persona
Create Final Persona
- We deliver a document to you containing the description of your persona as it has been designed, to embody your brand while it presents a personality to your callers whom they trust and enjoy speaking with.
Additionally, Usability Testing and Tuning, which are part of our standard User Interface Design service, are used to test the application’s persona. These activities provide another chance to modify the persona, change wording, and re-recording with different coaching. By monitoring callers and their reactions to the system, we can continue to maintain and update the system in line with caller needs and the application's persona.
Expertise
PTP takes a pragmatic approach to Persona Development, using your key business objectives as the drivers in our proven design methodology. Our team of user interface designers and project managers consistently exceed expectations by increasing customer satisfaction and automation rates, while also extending the organization’s brand to the IVR.