More than ever in the past, today’s telephony based voice applications must address large and very diverse calling populations. This audience uses a wide variety of personal, mobile and landline based devices in various modes to access information over the phone.
• At the end of 2011, there were 6 billion mobile subscriptions, according to the International Telecommunication Union.
• Mobile subscriptions outnumber fixed lines 5:1 (more so in developing nations)
• According to the US Census Bureau, the hearing loss population in the US has grown to over 31.5 million
• Linguists estimate that half of the world’s population is bilingual and there are about 5,000-6,000 different languages spoken in the world today.
• People of a particular culture or regional dialect may be comfortable with long pauses at the conclusion of a sentence, while people of another may find this demonstrates disinterest, lack of attentiveness and even disrespect.
Mobile phone use globally in 2011
Language, Dialect, Age, Culture, Gender and Communications Technologies impact the effectiveness of voice communication between humans and computers.
Add to this the fact that the world economy is constantly moving towards true globalization and a mixing of cultures, belief systems, languages and customs and it is easy to see why the norms of application design that once applied to a more static and homogeneous population no longer apply today. These factors are discussed in detail in a new white paper now available on Customer Think at the following link:
http://www.customerthink.com/paper/caller_demographics_and_mobile_technology_considerations_in_the_ivr
