Aculab, one of the leading CTI manufacturers in the world, too joined “Voice in Cloud” a year back and recently it has come out with new version too. I had a chance to speak to Faye McClenahan, Head of Strategic Marketing, Aculab about AculabCloud and how it is different from its peers!
AculabCloud: Complete Telephony Application in Cloud
While normal Cloud IVR providers tend to provide ‘voice to web applications’, AculabCloud promises to allow users to develop and deploy complete Telephony Applications rapidly using high level languages! Presently it supports Python and Microsoft .NET Technologies like C# etc. A complete telephony applications on cloud seems to be first of its kind from a CTI manufacturers.
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In the beginning of the year 2011, I had predicted about some IVR technologies as well as IVR applications which are likely to see high usage, on looking back, except speaker recognition, I can feel reasonably satisfied about the result of the predictions.
Among others, hosted IVR and bulk voice calling has almost gone mainstream now even in India. IVVR has been making steady progress with top VAS ( value added service) players in India creating application and content for it. Though 3G penetration has not made any spectacular progress!
As for usage of IVR in payment gateways, it is definitely getting wider acceptance as well as becoming more and more trusted method of charging one’s credit card!
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We wish a very Happy New Year 2012 to all our readers, advertisers and well wishers! Hope this coming new year 2012 would be year of great achievements, prosperity and happiness! Also, let us hope year 2012 sees end of terrorism, domestic violence and child labour!
With 2012, this blog would complete eventful four years! Before the end of year 2011, IVR World blog, we would like to list few article of this year :
1. Smart use of IVR based Missed Call : Phone verification
2. Will Click to Call service replace Predictive Dialer ?
4. When a machine treats a person humanly: IVR for payment reminder
5. Interesting Hosted IVR: Virtual Receptionist
6. IVR Benefit: Updated information all the time
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What is automatic call back systems ?
Automatic call back service can be defined as calling back by customer care department of some organisation to its client when it is unable to attend the call by the client or solve the clients problem satisfactorily and make a follow up call later. Call back service is employed majorly in a situation when all agents are busy in a call centre and unable to attend an incoming call.
Caller gets disconnected or gets an information before disconnection that she would be called back in some fixed time. So this way, the caller does not have to hold the phone listening to some ‘Hold Music’. The call centre can also register more such requests instead of giving ‘busy tone’ to callers while dialing the toll free number of customer service.
There are two types of call back services.
1. Automated Call Back Services
2. Manual Call Back Services
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One of the often-mentioned advantages of IVR Toolkit like VBVoice, Velocity etc. are its quick implementation of IVR system. To be more precise, implement the IVR call flow quickly with minimum requirement of coding!
While this is quite true that IVR Toolkit removes the requirement of coding the mundane subroutines interfacing the CTI boards, but question arises, is this advantage exclusively belong to IVR Tool-kits only ? I think otherwise! This advantage is equally shared by hard core C or C++ coding from old-school of IVR development!
IVR Tool-kits in a way can be considered modern day compact point and shoot digital cameras where anyone capable of pressing the shutter button can take beautiful pictures! And the learning curve to take picture consists of just three steps :
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One of the major advantages of CTI Applications is availability of huge computation power of computer along with telecom functions. Many telephone systems like PBX or answering machines can also have some computational power using which some call routing or other smart features can be implemented. But they can not perform highly complicated logical decision which is easily possible by a CTI applications.
One such small but widely used in some specific areas function of any telephone system is Call Screening! Call screening can be defined as filtering of incoming or outgoing call based on the caller ID or dialed number.
In incoming scenario, CLI ( Caller Line Identification) can be used to either allow incoming call or block it. Apart from CLI, DNI ( Dialed Number Identification) can also be used to allow of block calls. This is very useful in PRI connectivity in India where one PRI is normally provided with 100 different numbers along with one vanity number, known as “pilot number”. This kind of DNI based call screening could be used for many purposes!
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Recently I have traveled North and Eastern part India and met many people who are either using IVR systems or are dealing with call centres. While interacting with them, one thing I realised that, people are now warming up to the concept of hosted IVR in India. Most interesting part is, even bigger companies are now a days receptive to the idea of hosted IVR, which few years ago was a complete no, no.
I think, there are two major factors which have helped people warming up to the hosted IVR services :-
1. Reliable Internet connectivity
2. Cost Benefit : Pay as per usage model
1. Reliable Internet Connectivity
In the last few years, quality of internet connectivity has gone up manifold and downtime is no longer frequent unlike few years ago in India. Reliable and dedicated internet connectivity was also costly and not available easily, specially outskirts of cities, where industries tend to exist!
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Recently, I have come across many IVRs which asks multiple choice questions and press a key to answer the correct options. For every correct answer, the caller gets a point and these points are accumulated. If I remember correctly, this kind of quiz on IVR has been popular in voice portal services in India where some contest was organised and top 10 scorers were given prizes.
Normally, this kind of quiz contest on IVR used to work following way :-
1. Voice Portal had hundreds of questions ( some easy, some difficult).
2. The questions were asked randomly.
3. A caller can call many times till the end of the contest period.
4. The caller never gets a question twice whose correct answer has been already given by him. But wrongly answered questions may be asked again.
5. With every correct answer, his/her points keep increasing.
This kind of quiz contest were popular some 5/6 years ago when there was not IPhone or other smart phones! Now a days, I hardly come across such contests. May be VAS ( Value Added Service) providers have run out questions or people are no longer interested in playing such contest on phone.
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