Is it sad that I just had an amazing user experience by a totally automated system? Surprised the hell out of me I will admit.

As I'll be out of the office for a week or so I had stumbled about on the website of our local daily newspaper looking for the form they used to have (which has now disappeared) and was a little irritated at having to actually "phone" them to request a vacation delivery stoppage. Once connected to reception the automated system informed me of a 5 minute wait for a customer service rep (yikes), or, "she" could help me with the following things - vacation hold being one of them. What the heck I figured, I'll give Sally the Voice a go.

The cool thing was that it was all voice recognition stuff, no punching in numbers at all. Simply speaking "vacation hold" after the list of items selected that option, then she requested my phone number to be spoken to her, and then my house number. After that she wanted to know the date of stoppage and the date to resume. What cracked me up were the responses from her, they varied from "got it" to "thank you" to "great, thanks". And even funnier was the fake typing noise when she responded with "just a sec while I check the system for your account (insert fake typing noise here)" and "entering your request into the system now (more fake typing noise)". Too funny.

Very smooth and easy to use and the whole process left me with a "huh - now why can't all customer service calls be that easy and cool". Coolness aside though - let's just hope it works.