Customer profiling
Customer profiling is gathering information about customer related to their behavior vis-a-vis a product of a particular brand or it may be a general behavioral pattern towards spending habit and characterizing them. Customer profiling help a business know their customers, find their valuable customers. Customer profiling is also a great way of targeted advertisements.
Customer characterizing parameters may vary from one industry to another. But all industries need customer profiling in order to increase their marketing success.

It can be said that, customer profiling is a proven technique for success in marketing and sales.

How to do customer profiling is the question now! Interactive Voice Response System can be used for customer profiling easy way and IVR system can be easily modified for profiling customers of various industries.

Using IVR systems for customer profiling
Interactive Voice Response System is an intelligent equipment which can be used to profile customer without much effort! In fact, many of IVR users must be doing it, without themselves realizing it!
All IVR systems use “menus” which people choose to get information, submit information. There are also customers who always want to talk to a human agent! And that is also one kind of profiling. Those callers, who normally do not want to use menu options, well, do not bother them presenting any IVR menus, just try to connect her to a available human agent or inform that human agent would call her back or she may choose to wait for human agent to become free! It will save more frustration to the caller and save time for the IVR system.

Basically, the “menus” could be organised as per characters, traits needed for profiling and store which callers chooses what menu! This may not be a fool proof profiling, but it can surely tell certain behaviour patterns of the callers.

Another method of using IVR for customer profiling is outbound IVR surveys! This will simply dial out existing customers and ask simple questions and record their replies. This exercise can be completely automated, one excel sheet reporting at the end of the day in email inbox for that day’s customer profiles! One should simply parametrize the profiling category.

In an inbound IVR system, caller may be asked to take part in some simple surveys with customer profiling related questions and stored their preferences. In fact, asking a caller to store her language of communication in customer care IVR, itself is one kind of customer profiling! One could tell, how popular Hindi is by checking out Airtel 121 callers, how many have chosen Hindi as their preferred language!

Voice portals are at very advantageous position as they generate huge database where they record every activity performed by the caller. For example, in NTS Voice Portal application, every key pressed by caller, the last action are stored with time and date stamp along with the caller id. Also it stores what services are used by the caller and for how long! These records could be analyzed to infer certain traits of callers, and they can be profiled accordingly.

Finally, IVR ( Interactive Voice System) is wonderful tool for customer profiling and for targeted advertising for increasing sales!

What is IVR customisation ?
Normally, an IVR application is designed and developed as per requirement of the customer by IVR companies. But they have ready-made modules tested and readily available for quick development. Normally, the modules like, telephone interface, ring detection, caller ID detection, database connectivity etc. are always readily available. Also many people use RAD tools for IVR customization where they simply implement call flow required by the customer. So IVR customising can be described as implementing call flow of the IVR application as desired by customer using existing IVR related software modules.

In fact, after RAD (Rapid Application Development) tools have been introduced, IVR development have become just IVR customisation. Many IVR functionality, modules are available in RAD tools ready-to-be-used. It is not easy to develop an IVR application from scratch, as it involves auxiliary knowledge and experience about telecommunication switches, telecommunication standards and protocols, speech recognition, TTS.

While RAD tools are easy and quickest way to developed customised IVR application, but it may not suitable for IVR customisation which needs to interact with existing business processes or existing software which generate various data to be provided by the IVR. For example weather update, complaint ticket generation, complaint status update etc. Apart from these kind of complex and very sophisticated IVR systems, RAD tools are excellent development or customisation tools for IVR solutions.

One important aspect which many people overlook is writing script of voice prompts and recording of voice prompts professionally. IVR systems are to be deployed to be used by normal people for availing services, solutions from it. IVR system interacts with its user ( caller to the IVR) through voice prompts. Any mistake in voice prompts may render the IVR useless. For example, if the voice prompts announces, “to know your complaint status, press 1, or press any key to end the call.” Now imagine if IVR is coded to recognize 1 for disconnecting the call and any other key for asking further information to retrieve complaint status!

So, while customising IVR application, one must write script for voice prompts and record them with professional voice artists. Without this, IVR system may have the best of the hardware and most well coded software, still IVR system will not be useful to its intended users.

While customising an IVR application, one should think about future enhancements. Many times, one finds out that existing codes can not be used for enhanced services, features and everything needs to be done from scratch. This not only delays the process of upgrading IVR systems, also it become costlier.

While integrating with third party application or software, direct interaction with their database should be avoided. If you do so, any changes made by them would require you to make changes in your code too. So I think HTTP URL is a very good approach where you send few parameters for exchanging data from third party application. This will ensure that your IVR code need not be changed even if third party database is changed.

Without doubt, interactive voice response (IVR) has become the ubiquitous technology in telecommunications applications. IVR solutions have a myriad of uses that are mostly taken for granted, however, the essence of an IVR system is its ability to offer ‘self-service’ for the user, thus it can help to reduce cost and improve the customer experience.

Since introducing the world’s first ‘all-in-one’ voice board in 1998, Aculab has been setting the standard of enabling technology components – e.g., CTI cards – for IVR applications. Whatever your needs for advanced IVR functionality, Aculab has the media processing technology and APIs – voice, fax, call progress, etc. – to drive your success.

Beneficially, Aculab is able to offer a choice; from its range of IP-centric, DSP-based Prosody X boards to its host-based (SoftDSP or HMP) option, Prosody S. And you can use Prosody X for converged or mixed IP/TDM environments, where you still need E1 or T1 PSTN connectivity.

Additionally, Aculab\’s VoiceXML/CCXML interpreter set offers a powerful and scalable design option for platform vendors and service providers alike. It is the fastest, most cost-effective, high performance solution available today, which is an effective combination in any language.

IVR system features and capacities vary depending on the market segments they target. Small to medium enterprises (SMEs) may look to enhance their IP-PBX with an IVR-based auto-attendant using Prosody S, while larger companies will require a Prosody X board-based solution for a hybrid contact centre or voice portal, perhaps also using automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS). Carriers and service providers need IVR to provide a wide range of subscriber messaging and large scale, hosted or VAS and mobile VAS service offerings. And, undoubtedly, TEMs (of all descriptions; Tier 1, Tier 2, etc.) and platform vendors supplying these user communities will also benefit from Aculab’s board and software options.

Check out Aculab at http://www.aculab.com/solutions/IVR-solutions.asp

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.

IVRS Companies those work for medical industries are in good number. Rob McGrady, of Unit E-Clinical Consulting has compiled list of IVRS Companies for clinical trials. Thank Mr. Rob, for the update.

Here is the list of IVR Companies in clinical trial and health care :-

1. Almac
2. Aptuit
3. Averion
4. Bilcare
5. Clarix
6. Clinitec
7. Compleware
8. Covance
9. Criterium
10. DataTRAK
11. Easyivr
12. etrials Worldwide, Inc.
13. ICON
14. ICTI
15. IVR Clinical Concepts
16. Medpace
17. Parexel
18. Perceptive (they bought a large provider name ClinPhone recently)
19. Pharmanet
20. Phoenix Data Systems ( Update: Phoenix Data Systems merged with BioImaging and is now known as BioClinica : by Dave)
21. PPD
22. Premier Research
23. Registrat
24. Sympro
25. Swift Call
26. Synteract
27. Trident
28. UBC
29. Westat
30. Kendle : Provided by alexcline
31. Vocantas : Provided by Nicole from pronexus.com.

I hope this list of IVRS Companies will help people looking for IVR Applications related to medical industries.