Talking to customers on the Web
Qiping Zhang, Catherine G. Wolf, S. Daijavad, Maroun Touma · 1998
This paper describes an empirical study that compared three alternatives for voice communication in conjunction with Web page collaboration for customer service.Two of the technologies used a single phone line for both voice and data transmission.These technologies were intemet telephony and Simultaneous< Voice and Data (SVD), a protocol which allows the voice to be routed over the public telephone network, rather hart the inteme~The study found that SVD was superior to intemet telephony in terms of a number of behavioral and subjective measures of con\7ersational interaction.The study also found that task time using intemet telephony was 45% greater than with SVD, mtilng the former a costly rdtemative in terms of human time.