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 Software?. An Interactive Voice Response (Interactive Voice Response (IVR)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.

By Empirix, Inc.

Overview:

Almost as soon as the company's QA test group started testing, the consultants found serious problems with both the IVR and CTI systems problems that had not surfaced during in manual testing. The IVR system was able to handle as many as three simultaneous calls without problems; however, under higher load conditions, 10-15 percent of incoming calls would fail. Incorrect prompts would start to play for a couple of seconds, and then the correct prompt would break in.

Most customer contact with a company happens through the contact center. Traditionally, call center managers have focused cost and customer Quality of Experience initiatives on agent performance. As the contact center infrastructure has become increasingly complex, leading companies have increasingly recognized that their voice system and applications must perform efficiently in order for their agents to perform effectively.

For a customer call to be successful, many voice system components switch/ACD, IVR, database, network, and CTI must work together seamlessly. The entire system also must be able to handle the expected call volume and traffic, as well as grow with the business. To ensure seamless performance, most companies test their system in the pre-production and production environment prior to wide-scale deployment. Yet, for a variety of reasons, including time or expertise constraints to poor planning or execution, these tests fail to capture all the problems and truly prove that the voice system can meet the business objectives it was designed to support. As a result, costs go up, and customer Quality of Experience suffers. Problems are left for the customers to detect and for technical teams to scramble to resolve.

To help companies identify problems before their customers do and to ensure that their voice systems will scale, Empirix consultants have created this easy-to-follow guide for spotting and resolving bottlenecks within a Contact Center system. The paper describes the most common Contact Center bottlenecks that occur and the methods our consultants have successfully used to identify them. The advice this paper presents in based on knowledge accrued through engagements on countless system configurations at hundreds of Contact Centers.

Performance bottlenecks exist in all Contact Center systems. The application development teams that create Contact Center applications typically are responsible for locating, identifying, and correcting them before an application launches. Proper testing techniques and execution can help improve the performance of any step in the call flow, as shown in Figure 1. Note, however, that ensuring quality does not end with successful preproduction and production testing. Because a contact system will undoubtedly undergo software and hardware changes during production, ongoing monitoring is also very important. It will immediately alert contact center operations managers when problems occur, providing them with real-time performance data they can use to resolve these problems quickly basis.