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Set your barge-in options
Barge-in -- the ability to interrupt a system prompt with voice or DTMF input -- is useful for experienced callers and should be turned on in most situations. But there are situations where you will want to turn the barge-in function off, such as during the very first opening prompt, or when crucial information is being communicated by the system to the caller. For more information, read To Barge-In or Not To Barge-In
Set your confirmations
The ability to confirm with the caller what he/she said is a very useful, and often an indispensable device, for ensuring quality and accuracy. This device is available with two types of Voice Pages, Question Pages and Voicemail Pages. The default setting ("off" for Question Pages and "on" for Voicemail Pages) for Question Pages should be overridden only with pages where the information collected from the caller is crucial to executing a next step (bank account number, social security, full name, address, etc.).
Set your call scenario options
Call Transfer and Call Queue pages have a section called "Call Scenarios" that allows you to specify what action to execute depending on whether the result of a call transfer attempt was a no answer, a busy line, timeout on transfer, or call completion. The default for all scenarios, except call completion, is "Home Page". The default action for call completion is "End the Call". A good practice is to point the next action to a voice page other than the "Home Page" - e.g., a voice mail page that takes a message and gracefully ends the call.
Set your error destinations
Voice applications that use transaction or data pages should always have an error page associated with those pages to ensure that something user-friendly happens when an error occurs. You can associate an error page with a transaction or data page by clicking on the "Advanced Options" tab for the page and then selecting the corresponding error page from the "Error Destination" drop down menu.
Set your email debugging
When things go wrong, it is always better to find out about it sooner than later. The "email debugging" feature is an easy and built-in tool which can be set to notify you when an error occurs during the processing of a data or transaction page. Make certain that you always specify the email address where these error messages should be sent. For signaling errors, select the "On error only" option. See this tip for email debugging.
Set your Initial prompts in your transaction pages
Callers are typically on hold for a few seconds as data and transaction pages are executed. To mitigate the wait time perceived by the caller, specify an "initial prompt". This prompt will play while the data page operations are executed or the content of the transaction page is fetched. See Transaction Page Tips and Tricks for more information.
Set your Wait prompt in your transaction pages
If the "Initial prompt" described above ends and two seconds pass without completion of data or transaction page operations, the "wait prompt" is played in a loop until a remote server responds. Make sure that playing this prompt as a loop is not going to irritate the caller. Safe content for this type of prompt is on-hold music or sound indicating that the call is still alive (for instance, the sound of a computer keyboard).
Explicitly set your final no-match
The only thing more irritating than a system that does not understand what you are saying is a system that does something seemingly random once it decides that it will no longer try to understand your answers. Make sure that every final no-match in your Voice Site is pointed to a Voice Page that makes for a helpful next step. For more information, review Know what to do next.
Explicitly set your final no-input
Similarly, make sure that every final no-input in your Voice Site is pointed to a Voice Page that results in a helpful next step.
Mind your re-prompts
Pay specific attention to the flow of prompts when a no-input or no-match occurs. If a Question Page opens with the following prompt: "Great! Now, how many cigarettes do you smoke each day?" and the caller says nothing in response, a smart re-prompt would be something like, "Sorry, I didn't hear you. Please say a number between 1 and 100. How many cigarettes do you smoke each day?" A not so smart re-prompt would say, "Sorry, I didn't hear you. Please say a number between 1 and 100. Great! Now how many cigarettes do you smoke each day?"

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