An Escape from Automated Customer Support Hell

Mike Iacobucci wants to help you stop screaming at customer service agents--specifically, the automated ones that misunderstand what you say or require an endless series of button pushes to complete a simple task. Iacobucci is president and CEO of Interactions, a company that sells a new kind of interactive voice-response software for customer-care phone systems. With its software, instead of having to go through an interminable series of push-button choices or stick to overly simple verbal commands, you can talk just as you would to a human representative--and, surprisingly, it actually works. Interactions' software is, hopefully, more than a solution to impossibly annoying automated support systems. Rather than relying entirely on software to handle calls, Interactions automatically hands speech that its software can't cope with over to human agents, who select an appropriate response.