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Interactive Voice Response
This section of our technical library presents information and documentation relating to IVR and interactive voice response software as well as automatic call answering solutions.
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.
Call Center and IVR Success: Number Nine Visual Technology
Chris Bajorek,
Alex Pournelle
The Company
Number Nine Visual Technology provides PC-based graphics display solutions. A publicly held company headquartered in Lexington, Massachusetts, Number Nine has more than 130 employees, and offices in California, Germany, and Japan.
The Problem
For several years, Number Nine relied on a Centrex-based telecommunications system to support more than 40 full-time agents working in the sales and customer-support departments. To handle the numerous incoming sales and customer-service calls received daily, the company used an Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) to distribute calls uniformly among the agents. The ACD's lack of flexibility, however, caused in-house MIS engineers to be less than satisfied. The ACD was difficult to control, and when the company shut it down at the end of the day, the engineers often weren't sure whether callers in the queue were being disconnected.
The Solution
Looking for a truly flexible solution, Number Nine began to evaluate alternative call-center solutions. It chose the network-based Distributed Call Center from Teloquent Communications.
With Distributed Call Center, the sales manager and technical support supervisor have monitors that give them realtime reports about how many people are in the queue. This capability lets them make decisions about how many people need to staff the phones during certain time periods. The Distributed Call Center also lets the company identify and analyze improvement areas. For example, reports indicated that 2.5 percent of calls were lost. The company analyzed why these calls were lost so that it could make improvements.
Another important feature for Number Nine is the product's skills-based routing feature, which IVR makes possible. The company's products operate on a variety of computing platforms, so this feature offers a distinct advantage because it can route a technical support call to the agent most familiar with a specific OS or platform.
This feature also helped Number Nine with an unexpected problem. To counter extreme weather conditions one winter, the company routed calls to agents who were snowed in at home. The company was able to provide customers with technical support during a time when the majority of companies in the region were closed.
In the near future, Number Nine plans to move its technical support department to Burlington, Massachusetts, while keeping the sales department in
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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