Misalignment of what you think is important and what your customer thinks is important.

 Dimension Data has an interesting report on 45% of respondents to their survey would prefer to use DTMP (punch a number for each option), than to use Voice Recognition. This kind of thing happens when you fall in love with your technology, and a distance grows between you and the people that actually use your solution.

Now, that's quite a headline issue right there, but the central one of interest to me is that the "customer use case" in this research has some pretty interesting "implicit assumptions". For instance, "when I call, or get called", "reason for calling", "where I am". This is all good Telco2 stuff. Yet more than half of people and vendors believe that the Voice Recognition IVR implementation is primarily driven by cost savings:

Now, there is nothing wrong with trying to save money, but where is the two way benefit in the relationship? yes, if you pass on this benefits of low cost interaction in the form a low cost business model, the low cost has clear shared value for the customer.

Only 18% of customers thought that their interaction with a Voice Recognition Platform completely addressed the reason they called up in the first place. I think this is just a totally mindblowing figure.

VoiceSage is an outbound Interactive Voice Messaging service so when, where and for what reason you contact the customer must be very carefully examined. You must focus on why are you interrupting this person, what is the two way value to be communicated and demonstrated to the customer, and how closely can I reasonably meaningfully personalize this experience? By more closely examining the reason for the call, and the two way value generation potential, you will take this 18% problem resolution figure, and blow it through the roof.