IVR Solutions Company>

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.

• Up-to-the-minute service call information
• Airline departure information
• Claim status
• Power outages and areas of failure
• Stock market status

• It makes it much easier for callers to enter information. Using the touch-tone keys, especially on a small cell phone, is awkward and error-prone. With speech recognition, the caller can enter long number strings, alphanumeric sequences, words, and even sentences quickly and easily.
• It makes it possible for you to deploy much more complex applications on your IVR system, effectively increasing all the cost-reduction benefits of self-service. The more of your customer interactions you can automate, the lower your staffing expenses. The faster your customers conduct these transactions, the lower your PSTN costs.

• Add a help message at the beginning of a call or while the call is in progress. Prompts such as “Because you’re new, would you like some help getting started?” and “If at any point you need more information, say ‘Help’” make callers more comfortable with automated service and help them use the application more efficiently.
• Make sure your prompts are easily understood. Instead of “Say your ten-digit prescription number,” make sure the caller knows where the number is and what to do if it isn’t available: “Say the ten-digit number in the upper-right corner of the label on your medicine. If you do not have the number, say your telephone number instead.”
• Allow sufficient time for callers to provide the information you have asked for.
• Be prepared for the unexpected. If background noise or an out-of-grammar response prevents the speech-recognition application from understanding the caller’s input, use a prompt like “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that. There may be background noise, or you may have a bad connection. Try hanging up and calling again.” Avoid responses that trap the caller in an endless loop: “Please say the address.” “Start over.” “Sorry, I don’t understand. Please say the address.” “I want to start over.” “Sorry, I don’t understand. Please say the address.”
• Make recovery prompts more comprehensive. Use phrases like “Excuse me?” as rapid reprompts when input is not understood, or give callers multiple options with prompts like “For more detail, say ‘Tell me more,’ or to skip ahead, say ‘Next.’ For more options, say ‘Help.’”
• Be aware of soundalike words and numbers that might confuse the speechrecognition application. “qtc.com,” for instance, sounds like “cutey see dot com.”
• Use constraint mechanisms and confirmation lists to check alphanumeric input. Alphanumeric strings are the most difficult input for speech-recognition systems to handle, and the success rate with long strings is low. Build your application so that the input is compared to the two or three closest matches in the database, and then ask the caller to confirm: “Did you say oh-aich-zero-zero-seven-oneseven- three-ay-four nine-two-three?” If the caller says yes, the transaction continues. If the caller says no, the application presents the next-closest match for comparison. (A word of caution, though: don’t use this technique with secure number strings like credit card numbers.)