As I wrote once about making money with IVR Software, I have finally decided to write what IVR applications can be used to generate monthly revenue. Till recently, IVR Application or IVR Software was thought to be used only for increase in efficiency, reduce cost, automatic complaint management etc. Not any more! There are now IVR applications which are mostly used to generating revenue!

There are many IVR Applications in many industries, but the use of IVR Software in Telecom Industries is quite interesting! And this is where you make regular money. The most widely deployed IVRS Software for making money are :

1. Voice Portal
2. CRBT or PRBT

1. Voice Portal
Voice portals started as a premium service for quick access of information. According to various sources, it first appeared in 1999 in line with internet web portal.
With the advent of mobile phone, there was surge in value added service. This is when Voice Portals also got a push by telecom service providers.
Normally, voice portals are operated by a value added service provider (VAS) companies like Niche Tech Services (P) Ltd, or OnMobile in collaboration with a telecom service provider on revenue sharing basis. Normally, any call made to voice portal is charged premium. Voice portals provides various information, news, entertainment etc. The revenue model goes like this :
1. Per call is charged premium at Rs. 6 per minute of usage
2. Revenue is shared between telecom services provider and the VAS service provider. Revenue sharing is heavily tilted towards telecom service provider in India while it is opposite in some countries like China.
3. Billing is done monthly by the VAS Operator to telecom service provider.Telecom service provider charges mobile user in their telephone bills.

One telecom service provider can have many voice portals catering to many niche markets. The voice portal market is still growing and there are scopes for new players!

2. CRBT or PRBT
CRBT ( Caller Ringback Tone) is also known as PRBT( Personalised ring back tone.). This is nothing but an IVR Application as I explained earlier too. It also started quite recently in 2000 only! The increase in usage and popularity of CRBT is largely due to increase in Mobile Telephony and marketing by Mobile telephony provider.
CRBT has been very popular all over the world. Specially in South Korea, China and India. The revenue model is little different than voice portal. CRBT is again provide normally by a VAS operator to a telecom service provider. Here is the revenue model:

1. A subscriber is charged a monthly rental for using the CRBT service. Normally it is small amount like Rs. 30/- a month.
2. Subscriber can change CRBT tone by calling up a Voice Portal Number, add specific ring tone or song for a specific caller according to caller id. Each change is charged Rs. 15.
3. It does not charge for playing the ring tone for every call.
4. Revenue is shared between VAS operator and telecom service provider.
5. Since it uses songs, there may be a revenue sharing with music producers too.

Normally, one telecom service provider can not have more than one VAS operator for CRBT due to its technical setup. The market is still growing and big. There are still scope for new players, specially in India.

Apart from these two IVR Applications, I believe both Voice SMS, Outbound IVRS and UMS(Unified Messaging Service) are other IVR application which can be used commercially to make money. I will write more about them in future.

Special Disclaimer : The prices given above are just a number to give an idea of charging subscribers. It should not be taken as absolute fact.

Another interesting IVR Application is for courts. In fact many Indian High Courts have implemented IVRS. IVR can help decreasing footfalls in courts for many routine inquiries.

High courts can use both inbound and outbound IVRS. Inbound IVR Application can be mainly used for for the following:-

1. Providing information about any case as per case number, case today, court of the judge.

2. Providing information about holidays, leaves, postponement. It will be specially beneficial for people who travel long distance to attend a hearing.

3. Announce change of date of hearing, assigned lawyer etc.

4. Announce important information about the court and important rules and regulations as well as legal services and assistance provided by courts.

5. It can also work as paging for the lawyer of a particular case where a caller can send message for a lawyer.

6. Complaint about any employee of the high court. Report about anything which will help honorable judges deliver justice.

7. Feedback about court.

Outbound IVRS can be used for following:

1. Alerts services for lawyers about pending hearing, case. This can be paid service to lawyers as well.

2. Outbound call alerts judges about pending cases or shifting.

3. Outbound call to announce important verdict to the concerned parties.

There are few basic difference between outbound and inbound IVR Application. Normal IVR Application deals with inbound calls and call transferring. But an outbound IVR performs the few more tasks than an Inbound IVRS! And this is purely call handling point of View.

Though inbound application may have to do more computation as it has wider applications. But outbound calls have greater challenges in development. Here are few points to ponder about developing an outbound IVR Software:

1. Outbound calls may encounter various called parties! For example, the number dialed may turn out to be FAX number, so as soon as your call gets connected, IVR will get a FAX tone! So IVR has to detect FAX tone and and take appropriate action! It is specially important where outbound calls are payable as well as the usage time needs proper recording! It may face not only FAX, but also voice mail, answering machine, call forwarding etc.

2. Starting the message ( playback audio file ) after connection is very crucial! For example, if you detect FAX tone, you need to disconnect, not play the message! Same for Voice Mail, Answering Machine.

3. Deciding the type of card is also important. According to me, digital cards are better suited that analog cards. Here by digital cards, I am meaning digital interface like ISDN, R2MF, SS7! CTI cards are of course digital! Digital CTI boards can perform better in detecting FAX tone, Voice Mail, Answering Machine! Also, they give quick disconnection which important for call accounting.

4. Call synchronization is important. As outbound IVR Application will dial out multiple number simultaneously and some calls will be unsuccessful, which need to be retried! These kind of mechanism should be important and properly taken care of.

Few Features which are useful in an outbound IVR Application:

1. Outbound IVR application should have call transfer facility as an option just like inbound IVR application.

2. It should also have called party interaction through DTMF or Speech recognition.

3. The messages should be short and quick.

IVRS has application now in almost all industries! With the advent of telecommunication, IVRS has become almost an essential application to automate various business activities. Travel Industry has too IVRS application, which can help in a big way in customer service to any size of tour and travel company. In fact, any travel and toour companies get a lot of calls with routine enquiries which can be best attended by IVRS more efficiently and quickly! Remember, many people prefer getting information from IVRS than human!

Here are the few usage of IVRS in Travel Industry:

1. Quick response to a caller as well as to provide precise information.

2. It can search and retrieve from large database built over the years efficiently through IVR Application and provide the information to the caller quickly.

3. It can gather caller information by caller id as well as record and voice message.

4. It works 24 hours a day never goes on leave.

5. It can have many langauge choice to the caller and have intelligence to greet in local language as per the caller id and calling country! For example, if some one calls from France and he is greetd in French Langauge, I hope you will get a deal for sure!

6. It can generate automatic enquiry number as well as connect to human executive on requirement basis!

7. Minimum Human intervention for mundane questions will increase efficiency of executives and produce more result.

Here is a call flow for  a typical travel company

1. Caller is greeted ina language as per caller id.

2. Choice for Language.

3. Announce list of information available by the Travel Company.

4. Caller chooses an option, and it retrievs the required information from database and announce to the caller.

5. It can also connect to human executive during working hours or record the voice enquiry in audio file format.

6. MIS reporting of callers as per date and time and enquiry number.

The above call flow would definitely be customised from one Travel Company to other.

One of the best usage of IVRS is Complaint Management. Using IVRS in complaint management is a real value addition in customer care operation. Any organization which has reasonably large number of customers should go for IVRS. Here is how one can use IVRS in complaint management:-

1. Caller call up complaint number of the company and lodges his complaint, he gets a complaint number generated automatically by IVRS. Also IVRS will announce expected date of rectification or call back by the company.
2. Customer calls again. This time he checks for his status of previous complaint. IVRS retrieves the complaint status and announces accordingly.
3. Customer has option to transfer the call to human agent or transfer the call to other departments.

So with the above example, it is pretty explanatory that IVRS can be used for complaint management in any industry. Attached is a small call flow diagram for Faulty Telephone Number Complaint.

Call Flow Diagram for complaint Management

The above call flow is pretty simple! Here is some detailed call flow of complaint management.

1. Customer calls Complaint Number of the company. IVRS prompts the client to enter customer identification number of serial number of the product.
2. If customer ID is entered by Caller, it will check if any previous/recent complaints are there. If yes, it will announce the status, elese IVRS speaks out list of equipments purchased by the customer and asks to enter the faulty one. And continue with #4 below. Else continue #3.
3. If customer enters serial number of a product
4. IVRS will announce list of commonly known problems, faults of the product and asks for choosing one among them. Also this will have option to record the complaint in voice.

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4. IVRS records the choice by the customer, record the voice if any, and then store the above information in a database, generated a complaint number along with tentative rectification date and announces them to the customer.
5. As soon as customer hangs up, IVRS will create a complete database record and send out an email to the concerned person.
6. Another great enhancement is SMS. Once a customer lodges a complaint, an automatic SMS would go to his Mobile Number along with Complaint Number and expected rectification date.
7. IVRS will have record of all call activities as well as complaint MIS. This will help management of the company in improving customer care as well as monitor employee performance.
8. The IVRS can also be integrated with existing CRM or web based complaint management system.

There are many IVRS companies who can deliver such a solution as above. But integrating SMS and existing CRM is not that easy. Niche Tech Services (P) Ltd is one such company which specializes in customise IVRS as well as SMS and existing CRM integration.

The above two examples can be extended to any industry.

Both outbound and inbound IVR Application can be used as advertising tools. It can be quite effective as it can be really interactive with quick response unlike print or visual advertising.

Using Inbound IVRS as Marketing tools:
Inbound IVRS is those kind of IVRS where user calls to IVRS. Normally this kind of IVRS uses a toll free number. Else most probably, now a days nobody will make an outgoing call and listen to advertisements!

Voice Portals are such inbound IVRS where advertisement can be inserted. Voice Portal normally has many applications. Each application can have different advertisements. For example, if a voice portal has Music Application where user listens to songs, one can insert advertisements of upcoming music releases as well as movies. This kind of relevant advertisements will not irritate the caller much.
These advertisements can be interactive. For example, one can play promo of a movie, and ask people to rate the film. Same way for a song! This kind of facility is unique in IVRS.
Telecom companies can provide new schemes, services on their customer care number! This we may have experienced quite a time now!

Using Outbound IVRS
Outbound IVRS are those which make outbound calls to a person and provide some information as well as can get some feedback. Predictive dialer, Automatic Dialer are few such IVR Applications.
Using outbound IVRS as advertising tools has been there for quite some time now! Predictive Dialer is a kind of IVRS which is connected to a telephone database and it retrieves telephone number from this and makes outgoing calls. It tries to gather few information from the called person before it transfers the call to a live agent. Outbound IVRS can advertise the following way

1. Advertise about product after the connection. Give the called person option to rate the product, to give feedback in voice, to record if he is interested in the product and know further. Depending on the customer’s choice, IVRS can either transfer the call to a live agent or store the number is prospective client.

2. During election, candidate can make a “Vote for me” appeal on phone!

3. Various queries, opinion polls can be conducted.

4. Telecom companies can announce new services, schemes and prompt subscribers to avail them.

5. In medical industries, outbound IVRS can be used to advertise new drugs, its feedback. It can also prompt patients about daily medicines.

6. Many campaigners like awareness program can be undertaken effectively. For example, AIDS awareness, Pulse Polio Drops, Road Safety etc.

What is call flow ?

Call flow is the options offered to caller by the IVR Application. When a caller calls to a IVR number, he is given various choices. After he chooses one option, he may be required to enter few more choices before he finally gets his required information.  This complete call flow, right from the Welcome Prompt to the retrival of information and presentation can be presented in Flow Diagram in same as FlowChart for algorithm.

Importance of Call Flow

In my opinion, one should not even attempt to design IVR Application without finalising the call flow with the client. Changing Call flow may not only require changes in code, but also voice prompts! It may take time to record voice prompts, edit and test again. Many people do not like TTS ( Text-To-Speech) converter. So call flow finalisation is a must.

Customisation of IVR Application

Customisation of IVR Application is the design and finalisation of above call flow! The other technical integration like configuring CTI card, integrating with EPABX etc. are normally standard and same in all over the world. Also CTI vendors are quite prompt now a days in helping integrating their cards with different kind of exchanges. So, effectivily customisation comes down to only the customisation of call flow.

There may not be any fixed call flow for any industrial segment! Most probably Indian Railways have a fixed call flow for their IVR Application which they install at major Railway stations for train information announcement. Also they use different voice prompts and different languages.

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Most probably, this kind of customization requirement has resulted in coming out of Visual Tools to write scripts for implementing call flow by various companies! VoiceGuide, VBVoice, ExtendIVR  etc. have such tools for rapid develeopment of IVR Application! These tools have become so flexible and advanced, they can even integrate with existing database.

So, practically as a user, you may not have encountered IVR with same call flow at different places except few large organisations like Railways, Telecom Companies. This make using IVR difficult to use as well as this make IVR Application development challanging.

Speech recognition in IVRS has become more of a necessity after mobile phones have arrived. POTS ( Plain Old Telephone ) System have telephone instrument with proper keypad along with head-set. Procedure of calling is suitable for pressing DTMF based interaction with IVR System!

You normally lift the headset with left hand, dial pressing keys on telephone instrument using your right hand. So, when IVR is connected and you are listening to the voices by IVR System as well as pressing keys! While in a mobile phone, the tiny instrument itself is head-set, so when you are listening to IVR instructions, it is almost impossible to press keys without removing from your ear and looking at keys! The one solution is to use ear-phone or blue-tooth powered wireless headset!

Most probably, this has given prompted IVR developers as well as CTI vendors to come out with speech recognition for IVR Input. Though, speech recognition has evolved a lot, still speech recognition can not claim to perform 100%. This happens mainly because of pronunciation, accents of language from one region to another.

There are many speech recognition engines available. Nuance, Loquendo, Microsoft, Spinvox etc. are few companies which provide speech recognition engines on various technologies.

IVR with speech recognition capabilities are supposed to more advanced and suitable for mobile user, but it is actually very difficult to predict if the IVR application and speech engine will be able to recognise speech command properly. But IVR with Speech Recognition has been on the rise and every IVR Company now a days provide speech recognition. CTI vendors too support speech recognition in their hardware.

But still many people like me, will prefer to use DTMF for giving command to IVR as it sounds more technical. Most probably some people will take time get used to the idea of commanding some invisible machines by speaking!

800PBX Inc., USA has a very interesting IVR product. This is essentially an IVR Application that uses voice recognition for receiving customers calls and taking orders for pizza!

I found this quite interesting! Many a times, occasional Pizza eater like me, when I call up Domino’s Pizza, I get stumped by many jargn as well as various option and find no clue how to answer and prefer to hang up! But with Dial A Pizza (Restaurant) IVR Application will be of great help for people like us who will be able to listen the menu again and again ( which is not possible while talking to a live agent.) and try to understand and order the correct pizza.

800PBX offers toll free numbers too as the name suggests! They have offices in USA as well as in India. They have hosted IVR solutions.

Recent news article about 800PBX appeared on TMCNet.com from where I also got this information. Interesting quote as per the above article:

“A lot of automation is possible in the hospitality vertical,” said 800 PBX CEO Manohar Chapalamadugu. “It’s not just cost-driven, but quality enhancing as well.”
800 PBX Inc. provides virtual PBX and hosted IVR applications for both small and medium sized enterprises. 800 PBX specializes in IVR solutions like automated appointment scheduling, telephone orders, address captures and phone support systems.”’

For further reading or the full article, you can click here.

The only direct revenue generating IVR Application is Voice Portal.  I have posted about using IVRS as Voice Portal before.  There I tried to explain the overall Voice Portal operation.  Here I would try to discuss about technical challenges of developing and running a voice portal.

I would say, Voice Portal Application should be broadly divided into three tasks.

1. Call Handling

In a voice portal, many calls land on the IVRS Application simultaneously.   The number of calls at one time depends on the number of voice resources hardware used. There are not many CTI cards which provide high voice resources in a single board.  Server PCs too have 3 or four PCI slots only. So, in a single server, one may not have very high number of voice resources. Though there are various ways to connect voice resources between separate servers, one IVR application is going to work on a Single Server only!

Presently I have worked on one server ( IBM X3400) that has one Dialogic SPCI4 and two DNI2410 connected through CTI cables. We have total 480 Voice Resources and we have experienced 480 calls during Class X board examination result. And our server dutifully crashed too ! I still do not know why it crashed due to CTI card failure, Dialogic HMP Crash or Our IVR Application simply crashed! A quick restart of the server itself was the quickest remedy and also calls began to decrease with time, but this experience has forced me thinking to handle large number of calls without Server crashing or needing to restart.

For any large voice portal SS7 protocol  is the best and most suitable connectivity with Switch. It gives many flexibilities in the design, architecture and scalability.

So, with the above experiences, I would say one should design IVR Application with the following points in mind:

1. One process should only handle one call.

2. This process should implement only the call flow part and interact with Call related Messaging exchange with CTI device driver. It should though give out periodical status and updates to another process which will record those updates.

3. Event Driven Designing might be better proposition than synchronous status driven design.

4. Application should be built with online debug and monitoring facility. .NET remoting seems to eb an excellent option. I have no idea if there is any Linux Equivalent of .NET Remoting.

5. Activity Logging Facility should be there with another process. The call handling process should not be given any other task other than call handling. I have observed major problems occurring with other tasks like writing to disk, database etc. which might crash the call handling process.

2. Database Handling

Voice Portal Application generates huge amount of database records. Mainly apart from mandatory, CDR ( Call Data Record), it is expected that it records each and every activity by the caller. This produces in turn huge records. Many people tend to overlook this during designing of Voice Portal and pay heavy price later. And these many people includes me for sure.  All database handling tasks should be given to dedicated process whose sole activity is to insert and fetch data by Call Handling Process.

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My personal preference of database is MySQL as it is free and MySQL 5.0 and above have really cool features! But MS SQL is easy to install, learn and compartively larger trained manpower available.

Here are few guidelines I wish I had followed:

1. Two Tables one for Call Log and another for Activity Report are very important! So these two tables must be designed very well keeping in mind that these two tables will be used for many inserts as well as fetch during billing calculation.

2. Proper Indexing and avoiding data types like varchar, or any other datatype which takes longer time to process should be avoided.

3. Professional DBA should be given the task of Database design is the bottom line while IVR Engineer should restrict themselves to Call handling Part!

3. Content Management

Content management is often overlooked part of any Voice Portal Application! But once the above two tasks are complete and works flawlessly, its is the Content Management that needs constant upgradation with news services, applications! So, designing CMS application at the beginning of Voice Portal development should be stressed and followed. If possible, I would say Billing Computation should be totally seperate application than CMS.

I would say the following points to should be kept in mind:

1. CMS should support only local site (Single Site) or has to support remote site (Multiple Sites) too.

2. CMS Should have facility to check content before actually uploading the content. It should forcefully ask remainders to play the content once. Though its annoying, but it will help adding wrong content at wrong place!

3. It should support various wave format/ mp3 format conversions.

4. Should have remote FTP facility for remote upload/download.

hmm! Pretty Long and boring Article! Well, these are my own experiences and I have not actually developed very large Voice Portal yet. I tried Googling/Yahooing a lot about information about Voice Portal Development, I did not find many useful information. So I thought myself writing one! Please help me with your valuable input. I am a quite newbie here! Thanx in advance.