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Interactive Voice Response
This section of our technical library presents information and documentation relating to the IVR design process and Interactive Voice Response 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.
Our PACER and Wizard IVR systems add another dimension to our call center phone system solutions. 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 in-house service agents or transfers the caller to an outside extension.
IVR hang-ups a bad call for companies, customers
The following is an extract from the article "IVR hang-ups a bad call for companies, customers" by Barney Beal, www.searchCRM.com:
"It's the sound that so many customers hate to hear on the other end of their telephone line and the one that so many corporate cost-cutters love -- that voice telling you to "say or press 'one,' 'two' or 'three.'"
Interactive voice response (IVR), software that accepts a combination of voice and touch-tone telephone input and provides pre-recorded responses, has been around for almost a decade. Yet many organizations still don't use it properly, according to one analyst.
While there are certainly some decent IVR designs, the nightmare of endless numbered menus stands out in consumers' minds, according to Penny Reynolds, senior partner with the Call Center School, a Nashville, Tenn.-based consultancy.
"A lot of companies view [IVR] as the silver bullet, a solution to all of their problems, but don't take the time to understand how it works, how it's designed and how it's scripted," Reynolds said. "There are some dreadful designs out there."
Call centers hoping to maximize the investment they've made in IVR need to take a long, hard look at how customers navigate through their system. Just because there are nine digits on the phone doesn't mean you need to use them all.
The good news is that cumbersome IVR systems are not difficult to fix, Reynolds said. It's just a matter of going through the system the way a customer would, eliminating old options and, where necessary, adding new ones.
Advancements in speech recognition technology have made IVR systems easier to use and more profitable, Reynolds said.
Her prescription for remedying an ailing IVR includes:
- Putting the most commonly used options up front and making them accessible.
- Deciding how easy it should be for customers to opt out of IVR.
- Creating separate phone lines that lead to live agents who can handle customer inquiries that are too complex for IVR.
- Determining whether IVR or a live agent should be the first point of customer contact.
When used right, IVR can really contain costs....."
To view the entire article, visit www.searchCRM.com.
Wizard Simplifies Development
DSC provides IVR software including our IVR wizard development tool for creating interactive voice response applications.
Our IVR software lets you increase IVR development productivity by providing a visual development environment. IVR applications can be defined in minutes using this sophisticated, yet easy to use development tool.
DSC also has available a comprehensive IVR software library known as our IVR Wizard Software Development Kit. This optional package is available for programmers and systems adminstrators who wish to manage IVR programs fromLinux IVR, Unix, or Windows IVR operating environments.
Data collected by your phone ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) or IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems can be passed to your existing PC, Unix or Web applications through our phone software.
The PACER predictive dialer can automatically call your customers and pass only connected calls to your agents. With our computer telephony software, your telephone and computer work together to provide cost-saving benefits.
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