Recently, while I was talking to one of my clients about a customised IVR solution for his office, he suddenly asked me,”What benefits would I have by installing this IVR thing in the first place ?”. Actually, I was startled! I was on a paid consultancy chat and I was actually surprised to hear that question! I always thought that benefits of IVR systems are obvious and almost all in industry are convinced about it! So I took some time to reply convincingly about benefits of having IVR in his office.

But I thought, I must write some points about benefits of having IVR system in your office :-

1. Extend your office automation to your caller/customer
You have installed sophisticated software to automate many activities in your office and are experiencing immense benefit of it, but have you extended the same benefit to your caller as well as customer ? If not, please install IVR system today and extend all those automation benefits to your the callers as well as to your customers. Provide all information about company, contact details categorically like marketing, technical etc.

2. Attending the call at the first ring
Saves time to any industry, both the caller, and for the industry. Should I explain how time is money, OK, let me! 3 rings use 8 seconds and if you receive 300 calls a day (8 hours), and picks up calls after 3 rings every time, you waste ( 300 X 8 = 2400 seconds) 40 minutes in total of your callers! As well as yours so, it makes 1 hour and 2 minutes! It may not be possible for a human to pick up a call in one ring, but trust me, an IVR system will pick up the ring without any failure, every time.

3. Multilingual greetings to the caller as per caller ID
An IVR can speak many languages and can decide which language to speak by the caller ID just like an intelligent human! Making a caller, who is a prospective customer, feel at home with a his native language would surely put you at advantageous position than your competitor!

4. Personalised greetings to known caller
Make your caller feel important, get IVR to greet him with his first name! Yes, IVR can do that if the caller is known to IVR by its caller ID. It can even greet him as per his sex, time of the day and even wish him happy birth day/anniversary if he happens to call your office on his birth day! Though all these may not be necessary, but it surely puts the caller at ease and gives out a good impression about your office.

5. IVR works 24 hours a day and it never greets a caller with tired voice!
Your office is now open 24 hours a day, manned by IVR to answer all calls without any tiring voice. It will also present all information, stores message, can alert to designated person in case of emergency, automatically! Depending on nature of the office, industry where IVR system is installed, it can even give out emergency instruction to the caller!

So, these are the general benefits of having an IVR in your office. Though, there would be many special advantages and benefits depending on the industry where IVR is being used. I would just give an example here.

Suppose an support engineer of an ISP ( internet service provider) visits a customer premises for attending a net connection down complaint. He finds that some settings needs to be changed at his server end. What does he do ? He calls up some person in hs server room and ask to change the required settings for that customer. And that fixes the net connection! But many things may go wrong, the person in server room may be talking to some other person, he may have to answer nature call, it may become that all people in server room have left for the day as it was Saturday! But, if it had IVR which could change settings as per customer ID, it could immediately do the job and field support engineer would make the customer happy with quick service! Saves money, time and earn good will and happy customer!

If you know some special benefit, please send me in!

How IVR System is used as voice portal? Here is a simple guideline how to plan a IVR Software to use as voice portal and start earning revenue from the day one of launching the service.

1. Tie up with a Telephone Service Provider.
Normal revenue sharing is heavily tilted in favour of telephone operator in India. Tilted in favour of Voice Portal Operator in China and some European countries. If you could get 40% revenue for you from Telephone Operator, you have made a good bargain in India.

2. Select Services to be made available on the voice portal
Find out some exclusive and innovative ideas! If you have some really, really innovative idea, even Telephone Service Provider will help you! Few ever green services are
1. Jokes
2. Contest
3. Music
4. Astrology
5. Voting/Poll

3. Choose a easy number to remember
Choice of Voice Portal Number is tricky. Here are some thumb rule
1. Easy to remember
2. Availability in all operators in the target region
3. Logical Number

4. Choose CTI Card and PC Hardware
Since it will be a service available for all subscribers of the telephone company, start with at least 30 channels. So you have to buy a Digital CTI board with Digital Connectivity. You will need to use at least two Server class PCs. One for the CTI Server and the other for Database Server.

5. Choose IVR Software / Content Management Software
1. You will not get off-the-shelf IVR software for your Voice portal. So stop looking for one!
2. Lot of customization will be required. And constant upgrading of IVR software will be required.
So either hire full time IVR Engineers or hire a IVR Consultant company. Niche Tech Services (P) Ltd. is a good option for that who has proven track record in Voice Portal in India. It has both IVR Software on highly customizable and robust C++ platform as well as robust and highly customizable Content Management Software.

[ad#image-large]

6. Content
Content is very important. You need minimum one male voice artist, one female voice artist and a studio! Studio can be a simple sound proof room with PC and Sound recording Software! You also need one script writer and a content editor. You also need a audio editor. For music and other contents, you will have to tie up with music production houses as well as content aggregator.

7. Manpower
Man power requirement as follows
a. IVR Engineer : 2
b. Network Engineer : 2
c. Content Developer : 3
d. Audio Editor : 2
e. Scriptwriter : 2
f. Marketing : As many as you wish!

8. Marketing And Promotion
Marketing and promotion of the services of the Voice Portal is a must! Some sort pf tie up with any media house is a big plus. And it must be a constant ongoing process!