Jim Milbery: Tell me a little about Xtime's core product and why you made the jump to IVR.
John Lee: Well, the core value proposition is to eliminate the pain and frustration that exist when service consumers are interacting with service providers. The scope of what we're talking about is potentially enormous. There are personal services such as health care and auto maintenance. There are enterprise services such as professional services, capital equipment leasing and training services, and many other things that businesses buy. But in all cases there's typically a lot of inefficiency that takes place when transacting and delivering services. And, there has been almost zero automation so far in terms of the application of technology to deal with this friction and inefficiency. We address the front office and back office inefficiencies with our product which we call the TIMEngine, for Time Inventory Management Engine.

JM: The TIMEngine plugs into existing applications?
JL: That's right. Mostly, in very prosaic terms, we have a scheduling application that allows service companies to put their inventory or their schedules into our database and then open up channels of access to it. The Web is a very obvious place to start so that we can power the Web sites with an "I reserve it now" button. We also support phone-based access with voice recognition using IVR.

JM: Let's talk a little more about IVR.
JL: The technology is really slick. You call a number, maybe an 800 number, or a nationwide number for a Fortune 1000 auto services corporation. It might even be the phone number of the local store you look up in the phone book, but in both cases it is actually being routed to a call center powered by Xtime's voice scheduler technology. The application walks the user through a simple series of voice prompts. The whole negotiation process takes place through a very intuitive series of spoken commands and, boom, after 40 seconds worth of dialogue you have a confirmed appointment.

JM: With this kind of application do they have the option of pressing buttons and speaking?
JL: Yes. But when it comes to actually navigating the menus, it's all pretty much voice. We don't say press 1 for this, press 2 for that. It's more like "Which day would you like, Saturday or Monday?" and it works great. One customer in particular is a doctor in San Francisco. She has been using the voice scheduler for four or five months, and is now taking over 50% of her appointments using the IVR system.

JM: What challenges did you run into building your IVR layer?
JL: The main challenge is that it's a real nascent area both in terms of the technology and tools and also in terms of the market.

JM: Let's talk a little about how you use the BeVocal product.
JL: We chose BeVocal because we felt they would be able to accelerate our development and our launch of a commercial-ready IVR application. They definitely accelerated the development time with a combination of the right tools, great support, and help in understanding the technology standards involved in IVR.

JM: How many customers actually have the IVR-based Xtime solution at this point?
JL: We have a handful of customers right now. It's still in early access mode.

JM: Are you hosting this all yourself or do you give customers the option of putting the whole infrastructure on their own environment?
JL: We offer both options. We consider ourselves to be a technology company so we want to give our customers the full choice of options. We have a great fully redundant, highly available, highly scalable ASP environment for them, or they can do the hosting themselves.

JM: What has been the experience with the IVR solution on landlines versus wireless phones?
JL: Well, in the early-access tests we've been doing, it seems to work out fine. We don't see a huge difference in success rates for landlines versus wireless phone connections through the IVR system.

JM: Have customers been receptive to the IVR concept?
JL: A lot of it has to do with how well you design your UI. It's just like the Web experience. The quality of the user experience is everything, and the delta of a good user experience from a bad user experience may be very little. It's all in terms of the subtleties of how you plan out your UI and the forms and the flow and so forth. The same is definitely true, perhaps even more so, in the IVR space.

JM: In developing the IVR portion of this application, did it take longer than you thought it would?
JL: We thought it was going to be a difficult challenge and we were right. I think it took about as long as we thought it would. I mean it's a whole new bag of worms, really, and that's a characteristic of any new technology.

JM: Do you have any advice to give a company that's considering the development of an IVR solution?
JL: I would say first put a lot of slack into your schedules because it's going to be harder than you think. There are going to be a lot of hidden risks that you weren't aware of, so go into it with your eyes open. The lead engineer doesn't have to be an IVR expert, but take your best engineer and assign this project to him or her.

JM: Was IVR more difficult than doing a Web-based application?
JL: Yes.

JM: And the next jump to wireless, harder still?
JL: No, I think wireless is actually easier because the design methodologies and the conceptual parameters are a smaller version of the Web, which is very challenging and requires a different set of tradeoffs, but IVR is a one-dimensional UI.

JM: So do you think we as a market are heading more towards a WAP-enabled application or IVR?
JL: I have my personal opinions, but I certainly wouldn't make a large business bet one way or the other. In the meantime we really think that IVR is a much more immediately relevant technology for our customers. Why? Because the customers are asking for it. Few are asking for wireless.