Author Archives: mike

Why are your customers still waiting on hold?

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Waiting on hold is consistently one of the top complaints about phone-based customer service. One way to eliminate hold time is to hire enough agents that one is always available. Of course, this is cost prohibitive for most companies! Another way is to implement a virtual queuing (VQ) solution.

Shai has written a great series of posts on our VQ offering, Hold-for-Me, on his blog. See, for example:

There are some great cost-savings arguments that support the case for VQ. (I’ve been spending a lot of time working through these scenarios with prospective customers.) But I believe the best case for it is the uplift in customer satisfaction.

In today’s hyper-connected world, delivering a superior experience to your customer is something that echoes quickly and has long-lasting impact. I just came across this quote that sums it up nicely.

 

RIM isn’t going to make it.

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Research in Motion (the company behind the BlackBerry smart phones), released their quarterly updates yesterday, causing their shares to tank- dropping 21% on the TSE. Apparently this was mostly due to product delays and the announcement of layoffs.

The thing I find funny, is the curious 2M drop in volume earlier in the day:

Cough… (insider trading)… cough cough..

Wait until it gets to $20/share and buy! They’ll be Microsoft shares soon enough.

Net_DNS2 Version 1.1.0

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Net_DNS2 version 1.1.0 is now available for download from the PEAR site, or can be installed using the “pear” command line client like:

pear install Net_DNS2

This release includes support for signing DNS updates and zone transfers (AXFR’s) using SIG(0), a private/public key authentication mechanism. The OpenSSL PHP extension is required for this feature to work.

//
// create a new Updater object
//
$u = new Net_DNS2_Updater('example.com', array('nameservers' => array('192.168.0.1')));

//
// add a SIG(0) to authenticate the request
//
$u->signSIG0('/etc/namedb/Kexample.com.+001+15765.private');

//
// send the update rquest.
//
$u->update();

Support for the ATMA resource record- a method for publishing ATM addresses via DNS.

@      IN    SOA    name1.data.example.com.  name4.data.example.com. (
                                  1994041800   ; Serial  - date
                                  1800         ; Refresh - 30 minutes
                                  300          ; Retry   - 5 minutes
                                  604800       ; Expire  - 7 days
                                  3600 )       ; Minimum - 1 hour
       IN    NS     name1.data.example.com.
       IN    NS     ns.example.com.
;

salmon IN    ATMA   39.246f.000e7c9c031200010001.000012345678.00

And a new simple local cache system, using shared memory (using the PHP Shmop Extension), or using a flat file.

$r = new Net_DNS2_Resolver(array(

        'cache_type'    => 'shared',
        'cache_file'    => '/tmp/net_dns2.cache',
        'cache_size'    => 100000
));

Caching is disabled by default, and is only used for DNS queries (and not for updates), but can drastically improve query performance.

For more details, see the Net_DNS2 Google Code Page.

PERL Text-to-Speech using Cepstral voices (libswift)

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I’ve released two new PERL modules:

Speech::Swift – a PERL interface to the Cepstral text-to-speech engine, Swift.

and

Speech::Swift::Simple – a simplified interface to Speech::Swift

The libswift shared library is required to support this code, which is included with every voice downloaded from Cepstral.

The reason for two releases, is that the Speech::Swift module exports all (well, almost all) the underlying functions of the libswift.so library, while Speech::Swift::Simple has a simplified interface to generate speech in a just a few function calls.

For example:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Speech::Swift::Simple;

#
# create a new Speech::Swift::Simple with one channel audio, and 16bit encoding.
#
my $s = new Speech::Swift::Simple(
         channels => 1,
         encoding => Speech::Swift::AUDIO_ENCODING_PCM16
);

#
# set the voice to use by name
#
$s->set_voice("Allison");

#
# synthesize the text, and return it as a Speech::Swift::Simple::Wav object
#
my $wav = $s->generate("My name is allison");

#
# write the wav object to a file.
#
$wav->write("test.wav");

Or use the Speech::Swift library directly, for a more low-level interface.

The audio output is always as a WAV file; you can use one of the many audio modules available from CPAN, like Audio::GSM or Audio::MPEG, to re-encode the audio as needed.

Both PERL modules are available for download from CPAN now.