Custom IVR Applications

This section of our technical library presents information and documentation relating to IVR Development and custom IVR software and products. Business phone systems and toll free answering systems (generally 800 numbers and their equivalent) are very popular for service and sales organizations, allowing customers and prospects to call your organization anywhere in the country. The PACER and WIZARD IVR System is just one of many DSC call center phone system features..

What Is IVR?. An Interactive Voice Response (IVR) processes inbound phone calls, plays recorded messages including information extracted from databases and the internet, and potentially routes calls to either inhouse service agents or transfers the caller to an outside extension.

Contact DSC today. to learn more about our IVR services and IVR application development software.

The following is an extract from the article "Global IVR Networking Strategies" by Elizabeth Ussher.

"During 2003/04, investments in customer interaction centres will focus on agent productivity and decision support systems, along with renewed interest in customer management outsourcing.

Enterprise call centres will migrate to IP slowly (2005-07), with the exception of niche applications (e.g., knowledge worker), due to reliability concerns and reluctance to add risk to customer-facing activities.

Enhancing the availability of enterprise information through augmentation by self-service or assisted-service applications has become a fast-tracked project due to potential cost savings.

Any customer telephone request that can be satisfied by providing the customer with information alone gleaned from corporate databases or other information repositories is a candidate for an IVR application. An IVR or VRU is the technology that "pre-answers" callers most often in a customer service application, and provides numerous options whereby the caller can get information by pressing the appropriate key, and increasingly just by speaking.

Although these electronic agents can be annoying at times, if architected properly with the customer as the "design point", these tools can become the customer's primary information source, eliminating interminable waits in queues.

Enterprises will continue to grow customer interaction centre (CIC) opportunities through various queue options and IVR applications, many of which are currently supported on standard server platforms and OS components (e.g., Intel, IBM AIX, Sun, Microsoft).

Driven in part by mobility, the integration of advanced speech recognition (ASR) and speech-to-text (2003-05) capabilities continues to enrich and expand the user experience.

As new standards evolve (e.g., VoiceXML, Speech Application Language Tags [SALT]), expansion of voice services to economically support customer requests will also expand.

Due to successful trials, we expect ASR quality improvements and increasing user comfort levels to enhance adoption through 2006. During this time, price rationalisation through vendor competition, standardisation of speech objects, and experience in deployment will enable more comprehensive, cost-effective deployments (2008)....."