Designing and documenting IVR applications for business and public service:
VUI designer (Voice User Interface) ensuring industry best-practice standards.
Call flow scripting with DTMF (touchtone) dialogue design. Voice talent coaching for accurate delivery.
Audacity audio editing of prompts. Documentation of the wording and the logical flow.
Proficient user of MS Office365 and all the previous versions, plus MS Visio, LibreOffice Draw, yEd graph creator, and proprietary design tools. I learn new tools quickly. My designs work within the capabilities of your
existing hardware and software.
Other computer and business skills aiding IVR design and project delivery:
Asking the important questions to help clients identify and clarify their firm requirements. Writing and revising project specs with clear version control. Managing expectations to prevent scope creep, and to identify billable changes. Clear paper trails of the stakeholders' agreements. Facilitation of team discussions.
I advocate for the client's business success. Together, we fix your existing system to be more effective.
Non-computer skills and interests: Harpsichord performance, organ, clavichord, piano, classical recording production,
music arrangement and editing, composition,
basso continuo improvisation, tuning harpsichords by ear.
Discovered a tuning method for Bach's music,
and wrote internationally-known papers about it.
Staff writer for a bimonthly journal
reviewing classical music recordings (more than 250 published reviews), to exercise my
public writing skills.
Conversational in Spanish and German, and able to read French. 1/4 time church organist.
Role: I design and test sensible call-flows for automated phone systems. They must be efficient, clear, and non-intrusive. I've put in the years as a senior IVR designer/developer, making and maintaining the big complicated systems that have call centers and integrated data sources. Some of them had speech recognition.
My passion, though, is the much simpler applications: short-term projects for small companies that don't have an IVR staff. You have a straightforward low-budget system that plays a small handful of recordings. It has touchtone navigation ("For business hours, press 3."). You know it's saying old and wrong things in its messages, and it's frustrating your customers. Its logic is broken. It's full of cliches that make callers annoyed.
You need someone to assess it, redesign it, and help you straighten out your messaging for best effectiveness. You need someone to help make your own customers happy when they phone your company or department for simple information.
That's me, your temporary consultant. I figure out what you need, and help you fix it without buying any new hardware. We'll just ask the right questions better, by industry standards of best practices for simple touchtone applications. We'll improve the messaging, the logic, the clarity, and the pace. I can edit your voice recordings to sound better, and script the right things to say. At $50/hour we will fix whatever can be fixed within 10 to 40 hours of work.
Location: I live in Dayton Virginia, about 125 miles from either Washington DC or Richmond, and 65 miles from Charlottesville or Winchester. I have an office in my house. We can work by phone or video discussions, and e-mailing designs and audio files. I can test your system by phoning it (obviously) and listening to everything it says, along with studying the instruction manuals of your phone system.
My recent titles:
Details of my education and work history are in a 2017 MS Word version of this resume. They are also in my LinkedIn profile, https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradleylehman/
An installer of solar-energy technology, a beverage retailer, voter registration systems, utility companies, retailer product-support lines, product recall notification services, pharmaceutical information lines, medical and ambulance practices, a dental network, Planned Parenthood, job-search lines, credit card payment systems, payment tokenization with credit checks, subscription renewal notifications (outbound), social services (housing eligibility inquiries), 866OurVote, the Chickasaw nation, the US Environmental Protection Agency, and more.
© 2019 Bradley Lehman -- Thank you for reading!