[December 14, 2004]

Tend It Like Beckham

BY DAVID R. BUTCHER

Adidas (quote) recently partnered with Angel.com (news - alert), a provider of Web-based advanced telephony solutions, to create a different shopping experience for the football (soccer) fan. Beginning this month, displays will be set in approximately 100 Sports Authority and 50 Dick’s Sporting Goods stores nationwide where the David Beckham Predator Pulse collection will be merchandised, as a launch promotion for the European soccer and media giant’s new footwear and apparel collection.

Like KB Toys’ recent selection of Angel.com for its holiday-preparatory on-demand IVR implementation, each store account will tend to its customer base with a custom toll-free number; in this case the consumers can call to hear Beckham himself inform the callers about the features of his new collection. (Hereafter Beckham will be referred to as Becks, as his home country calls the paterfamilias of the “second royal family.”) Becks speaks via the Voice Site technology, through the phone call, about his new range of Predator footwear and apparel as “the ultimate combination of performance technology and style.”

Angel.com’s Voice Site technology, used for this product strategy, is based around intelligent speech recognition, enabling customers to have telephone-based interactions and to receive specific information.

According to the company’s Web site, “Voice Sites are like Web sites for the telephone: Web sites have interlinked Web pages, and Voice Sites have interlinked voice pages.” To use a Voice Site, you call the toll-free number the implementing company attains through the Web-based SiteBuilder application; you listen to the options presented to you; and you make your decision by speaking naturally. Angel.com provides simple documentation that overlays IVR concepts onto traditional Web development practices, creating a WYSIWYG design environment familiar to anyone who's ever built a Web page.

Not only will implementation of these Voice Sites allow adidas customers to hear what the star athlete thinks of a new product line, it also provides valuable information regarding customer interest in this collection by tracking the number of people who call the toll-free numbers from stores. This entertaining Web-based telephony-driven promotion is intended by adidas to “take point-of-purchase to the next level.”

Now if they could only make the Becks voice interactive, with artificial intelligence, so the dialogue could go off-topic and conversationally retort to such off-topic inquiries and quips:

Caller: So, David, I’m still not terribly happy that you left Man U*, but I am looking forward to your new collection of adidas shoes.

Voice Becks: I love now playing for Real Madrid. Now let me tell you about the range of the Predator footwear and apparel…

Caller: Actually, I’m more interested to know what it’s like being married to…you know…Posh Spice.

Voice Becks: Victoria? Please. Have you seen her? We have two kids. What do you think?

Caller: EXCELLENT! And having the Biblical version of you, in which your wax figure is represented as Joseph and Posh-err-Victoria as the Holy Mother in a Nativity scene, being attacked by — ahem — a “protester”? How do you feel about neither wax W. Bush nor wax Blair nor wax Samuel L. Jackson being vandalized? Is this guy not one of the lamest protesters you’ve ever heard of? Don’t we have more important issues, somewhere out there in the world, to protest? I’m sure if I sat and thought long enough about it, at least one thing would come to mind that’s deserving of a proper protest, without social action considered as being to push over wax statues of a football player and his gorgeous wife.

Voice Becks: At least the baby Jesus was OK.

Caller: You’re so right, Becks. So right.

For one option of how to tend more to your customer base, with on-demand IVR, visit www.angel.com.

* Manchester United

David R. Butcher is assistant editor for Customer Inter@ction Solutions Magazine.

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