There has been a lot of talk recently about the concept of VUI standards and whether or not they are necessary to help designers do the right things for callers. In a November Speech Technology article about VUI standards, several designers (including this presenter) agreed that VUI standards are not the final answer. For this presentation, we will build on the basic assumption that most designers already know intuitively what’s right for callers, and that the real difficulty is in convincing business decision makers (the customer) to employ proper design strategies. This talk will come in two parts: Part one will provide some rules that decision makers should take into account when designing an IVR, with descriptions that can be used to convince their customers to follow these rules. Part two will offer techniques and arguments to help convince customers to make sound design decisions. We will also explore tools, such as the use of data and reporting, as well as effective  caller survey techniques, which can be used as tools to convince decision makers to try our methods and evaluate the results before ruling against us.