IVR Solutions

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.

VoiceXML frees users from being locked into technology silos.

by Coreen Bailor

VoiceXML, or Voice Extensible Markup Language, has made its way into the contact center and is bringing standards to the IVR.

According to the VoiceXML Forum, VoiceXML uses speech recognition and touch tone on the input portion of an interaction, with prerecorded audio and text-to-speech synthesis for output. "You are basically interacting with a voice browser," says Ronald Gruia, program leader, enterprise solutions, at Frost & Sullivan.

"VoiceXML is a standard language for developing basically automated applications for interactive voice response systems," says Kevin Chatow, Nuance principal product manager.

Prior to VoiceXML, Chatow says, each IVR vendor had its own proprietary languages accompanied by high development costs, a limited pool of developers, no portability across platforms of applications, and limited flexibility in deployment options. "With VoiceXML [which is] based all on Web standards, it's very distributed in nature," he says.

As an open standard VoiceXML frees users from being locked into technology silos, while alleviating portability and cost headaches, proponents say. In the past companies would be "trapped in the technology silo," says Daniel Hong, CRM analyst at Datamonitor. "If they wanted to upgrade they'd have to go through that same vendor, so essentially these companies were able to get high margins from that technology locked in. VoiceXML is a lot better for the industry because it not only increases competition...but now there are a lot more vendors out there, so the solution is evolving at a quicker rate and is more viable than before."

"OPEN" IVR Software

Most IVR systems are built into the phone system or are self contained programs running on a separate system, allowing limited access to outside applications. Our Interactive Voice Response systems with voice mail services operate in a client/server environment and the script that controls our IVR systems can be developed on the Pacer Phone System, on a system residing on the same network as our phone system, or even on a system that resides on the Internet. This interactive voice response program can run on the same server that contains your data and application programs. There are several advantages to using this technique. IVR applications now have complete access to all the information available to your existing database programs. The IVR system can perform functions such as dealer lookup, account update, or information access, and simply pass the results back to the interactive voice response system to be played to the caller.

IVR applications can be developed using traditional programming languages such as C, C++, or even COBOL through a rich set of IVR software API’s. We also provide you with our own IVR software scripting language called EZTRAN (which runs on Windows, Unix, or Linux) for the development of IVR applications.