Today on 23rd August, ivrsworld.com has turned two years old!

I would like to thank all readers and their valuable comments on this blog. When I started writing this blog two years back, I simply wanted to keep posting about information about IVR that I Google in internet, various IVR related news, my personal experiences with various IVR projects. But I think it has now become a blog about IVR!

IVR Visitor

The turning point came somewhere December 2009, when this blog had started getting more than 100 unique visitors per day and I thought I should take it seriously ( presently, the latest figures in Google analytic shows 4400 unique visitors a month, majorly from India, USA, Canada and Europe). It felt good when this blog is shows up at first page in Google while searching for many IVR related keywords! The registered readers ( Google Feedburner) of the blog has reached 100 with email IDs ending with dialogic.com, sangoma.com, pronexus.com, invox.com, aculab.com to name few! These were surely inspiring!

Then VBVoice, IVR toolkit for .NET developers came as sponsor which was moral booster! Otherwise I was majorly using Google Adsense to display graphics, not to earn anything!

Then MessageTech, the hosted IVR Service provider has come to sponsor and I even could afford a paid WordPress Theme for the blog.

I thank you all the sponsors for sponsoring this IVR blog which were really helpful and inspiring. I hope to have one more sponsor this year so that I could host www.ivrsworld.com on VPS/dedicated server with minimum down time . Presently it is on a shared hosting and I have been embarrassed few times when readers mailed me to inform they were not able to open the site.

I thought I would prepare a PDF book in the second year, unfortunately I could not not achieve that, but this year, I will again try to achieve that. Other wise, I think, ivrsworld.com has had a good year!

This year, I would test more CTI boards, IVR RAD tools and post my experience here. And at the end of year, I would like to prepare a comparison chart using some common parameters.

I had finally added a WordPress Classified Plugin for IVR Marketplace. This feature in www.ivrsworld.com will allow readers to post their IVR services, Ask Experts, Advertise IVR Services, IVR Development Tools, IVR Requirement.

Looking for a IVR projects? Trying to find a IVR consultant? Looking for an CTI Board? Looking for getting CTI Board on rent ? Browse our classifieds. Have a IVR project to advertise? Looking for freelancing IVR Work ? Post a classified ad.

IVR Marketplace

1. Anyone can place an advertisement by just clicking on Place Ad. One does not need to be a registered member of www.ivrsworld.com to post an advertisement. We request to use a valid email id as that will be required for future editing. All advertisements are approved by administrator.

2. All advertisements can be browsed by, replied by Browse Ad. Anyone can reply, comment on any advertisement.

I hope this feature will be useful for many IVR users.

EGAIN, IVR System, IVRS Company

I came across an interesting IVRS ( Interactive Voice Response System ) application on net while browsing Google search results. eGain, the leading provider of multichannel customer service and knowledge management software, headquartered in California, USA, has recently added “Intelligent Voice Self-Service Solution to Its Multichannel Customer Interaction Hub Suite”!

That must be a smart IVRS application! As per their press release, their solution enhances user experience in the IVR “integrating it with other communication channels“. By applying web self-service best practices such as seamless escalation, unified cross-channel content, and CBR-guided interactions to IVR, it redefines phone self-service and increases customer adoption of the channel, as they claim.

eGain has patented CBR System ( Case Based Reasoning) which captures agents expertise of a contact center and with help of this, the IVR Software can prompt customers with intelligent questions based on caller replies and finally provide the correct information to the caller.

With eGain IVR, businesses are able to:
a. Allow IVR users to access the same information and complete the same transactions that they would be able to accomplish through other channels.
b. Offer context-aware escalation to multiple channels, including live agent channels such as phone and chat, and asynchronous agent channels such as email.

About eGain:
eGain (OTC BB: EGAN.OB) is the leading provider of multichannel customer service and knowledge management software for on-site or on-demand deployment. For over a decade, hundreds of the world’s largest companies have relied on eGain to transform their traditional call centers, help desks, and web customer service operations into multichannel customer interaction hubs (CIHs). Based on the Power of One™, the concept of one unified platform for multichannel customer interaction and knowledge management, eGain solutions improve customer experience, enable self-service adoption, optimize service process end to end, increase sales, and enhance contact center performance.

Complete details of the press release, click here.

Many people seem to confuse with IVRS and Auto-attendant and Answering Machine!

Though  Auto attendant and Answering Machine may be compared, but comparing IVRS with either of them is comparing armored vehicle with F-117! ( Hope I have given the right analogy.:) ), they have similarities but they have major difference in usage, scale and features.

What is IVRS, to know one can read What is IVRS, a previous article in this blog.  Or one can search in Yahoo or Google or Wikipedia. And here are few differences I am listing:-

1. Auto Attendant attends a call, and can transfer a call to extension as per caller dialing. IVRS can do all these too. But IVRS can retrieve data and playback information which Auto Attendant can not do! Answering Machine normally has one prompt which gets played after certain number of rings if the calls go unattended, and record a message from the caller. Also it plays back the recorded messages. These are the functons of Answering Machine.

2. IVRS is very smart and intelligent system while, Auto Attendant and Answering Machines can not be said to have any intelligence! They do few things as per pre-programmed! IVRS has vast applications! It has not applications in almost every industrial sectors including pharmaceutical  research activities too.

3. IVRS can work like an answering machine or auto attendant, but they can not work like an IVRS apart from the above tasks!

4. IVRS can work like a voice portal while no one can even imagine auto attendant or answering machine to work like voice portal.

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5. Auto Attendant and answering machine are low cost equipment, normally built in phone instrument or EPABX. While IVRS requires Server Class PCs to run, costly CTI cards and costly software engineers. Also IVRS can have few dedicated IVRS blogs, while I doubt if auto attendant or answering machine will have more than 2/3 pages in some websites.

6. Auto Attendant and Answering Machine has limited configurations and limited recording options, IVRS has almost unlimited applications and configurations!

I hope these six reasons should be enough to convince anyone the difference between IVRS, Auto Attendant and Answering Machine! There is a Voice mail System too which is a CTI application again, but a single function of storing recorded message! So, one can think of Voice Mail System (VMS) as a one kind of IVR Application .

Fact is, an IVRS is a technical interface to humans, just like a web site is. And just like many web sites, it was probably built and programmed by some engineers without a lot of direction from Marketing or Customer Service. There’s really no reason at all why the folks optimizing the web site should not also optimize the phone system too – especially if they do a good job with the web site in terms of usability! Here are the guidelines for optimizing usability:

1. Be Specific and to the point.
Once the voice prompts and information are recorded, each and every sentence, word should be examined if they are required or not. The message should be conveyed in shortest possible phrase. Unfortunately there is no way to predict effectiveness of the IVR prompts except testing with real callers. Some menus may require little descriptions to make it more understandable to the caller.
2. Setting Priority of Information
The biggest drawback in IVRS visa-a-vis its counterparts are, they have to be presented in serial manner, ie. The menu is played one option then the next one. Its unlike a website, where all options, links are presented visually in the webpage and some links are blinking, some are bold etc. Alas, in an IVR Applications, one does not have that luxury! The implication here is that you need to find out which paths through the system are going to be the “journeys” most traveled by your users, and you need to put these at the top of the menus, to make sure the experience is short, direct and hassle-free.
3. Build Prototype and test on real users before commissioning
Acceptability of your IVR System by your customer can not be properly predicted. So the best way is to build a prototype and ask your clients to use it and get their feedback. You should make a complete call flow of your IVRS, circulate among your clients and get feedback. You may also circulate your script. Many times, scripts looking good and logical may not sound logical while listening on telephone!
4. Professional Scripting for IVRS prompts and information
All the sentences or voice prompts, information should be professionally scripted. Scripting should be done as per the industry where the IVRS is being used as well as the target callers.

5. Use short menu and Menu style
Designing a effective and attractive menu is a real challenge in IVR Application. Menu should be short in options, brief in discussion. Also you should always describe the option before speaking the option number. For example, use “to know about our promotional sales discount, press 3”, instead of press 3 to know about our promotional sales discounts”. It will help caller remember the option as per the description. Long menu tends to bore the customer specially when his required option is spoken at last.
6. Use professional Voice-Over Artist
In a IVR System, audio is of prime importance. Poor quality audio, background noise, poorly edited audio will give a poor impression on your company. It will also give them impressions about how your company works. So it is strongly advised that one should hire a professional voice-over artist and get all scripts recorded in a studio by a sound recorder. It may cost you little more, but it is worth every penny.
7. Avoid Promotional Messages
Normally, you should avid putting any promotional messages in between your prompts or information. You actually never know who might call you. Though some marketing people in your organization may insist on putting some promotional messages, remember one thing, a person may get impatient and can be in a bad mood. It may serve the other way around then!
8. Make IVRS Adaptive and Intelligent
IVRS should be capable of intelligently adapting menu options. For example, it should wish “Good Morning” in the morning and “Good Afternoon” at afternoon. One should also monitor and analyze call patterns, oft-used menu options, hang ups, call failure, dropped calls periodically and change the priorities of menus. Adapting to customer need is the key to success of a IVRS.

9. Never rely exclusively on Help menu
Though one should provide thoroughly user-tested help menu, but never rely on them. No one wants to read help menu or refer to help menu except when one is stuck up. So, it is advisable that menus be designed smartly self-evident and obviously logical. Also never give excuses like “its all described in the help menu” to customer.
10. Use standards
There are a number of standards for IVR system design, such as HFES 200.4 and ISO/IEC 13714. One should use them to test their IVRS for usability test. Best way of USABILITY of IVRS is still hiring an IVRS EXPERT like yours sincerely.
11. Avoid Long gaps in between menus or information
Never pause long for any reason. Once caller gets silence for more than 3 seconds or so, he might think something has gone wrong and press some other keys! But then a menu with short gap can make a rapid fire menu and will be difficult to use for caller. A perfectly paced menu should be adopted as per target caller, complexity of the features. The best way to achieve perfectly paced prompts are again testing by users!
12. Make Voice sounding natural as much as you can
Here is an important guideline. The prompts, information should sound natural sentence. For example, in normal conversations, one normally emphasizes on the last word. The IVRS recording should follow the same pattern too. For that reason, a sentence should be recorded fully with the complete script. Putting new words in between a sentence should be avoided. Also, one should never use “constructed sentences” where words are recorded separately! It will not have a proper flow of a sentence and give very poor quality and wrong impression. It will also reflect unprofessional approach in the business.
13. Keep your features small
IVRS should have small specific features! For a large organizations, where more features are must, it is advisable to use separate numbers for user to dial. Or user should be given option to access particular service by some direct dialing method. Now a days many exchanges offer facility to configure range of a number. For example, 56969XX where 56969 is actual number, but user can dial 5606901 for sales department, 5696902 for accounts, etc. This helps serve the customer better!

The most essential requirement of an IVRS is that it has to work 24 hours a day, 364 days a year! It is not an application like your MS Word or Outlook Express that you run them when you need! Also IVRS does not have any User Interface. The reason for not having User Interface is obvious! It interacts with human through voice and telephone instrument keypad. (These are actually DTMF Digits. I will explain about DTMF, Pulse dialing in another post.) So, a typical IVR application does not require to be executed manually, it starts as a service in Windows Operating System as soon as it boots up. ( Or same way in Linux)
So, in order build an IVRS Application, the following are essential

1. How many channels to be used? How many calls it should handle simultaneously?
2. How should it be connected to PSTN Lines? Connection may be in two modes, analog and digital.
3. Type of Hardware used. It requires two kind of hardware – a. A PC or a Server b. CTI hardware.
4. Voice prompts Recording or TTS (text-To-Speech) Engine.
5. IVRS Software.
6. Power supply and wiring arrangement.

Number of channels greatly depends on number of calls the user is expecting. For example, if it is public utility (Like 100, 101, Railway enquiry etc), the number of calls will be high. If it has to handle large number of calls (more than 16 numbers), it should be connected using DIGITAL technology. And you will have to use a digital CTI cards too. Digital Cards are more expensive than analog CTI cards and they start with minimum channel count of 30. If you are going to use a Digital card, use a Server. There are many CTI cards, both analog and digital, available in various configurations.

Then the voice prompts! These are voices you hear as soon as you dial the IVRS telephone numbers! These are pre-recorded voices which are played as soon as your call is established. Normally one should get recorded the voice prompts and for any dynamic content or data, TTS may be used. But the voice quality of TTS is still poor specially it may be difficult to understand to people whose mother tongue is not English.

Once you finalized the above, it is time to develop your IVRS Software or find a IVRS Software development company! There are many IVRS Software development companies in the world. Many IVRS Software are developed on various platforms, using different languages. The best IVRS (in terms of robustness, features, easy to configure and maintain) are the IVRS software which are developed in C++. If you intend to develop a IVRS Software on your own, buy the CTI hardware, and read the APIs. Also you need to have thorough knowledge of PSTN exchange. Specially to configure DIGITAL CTI card using SS7, MTP3 ISUP, R2MF, ISDN PRI etc are time consuming and let me warn you, they are not easy! Also you have to have these infrastructure to your testing purpose! ( How many of you have an exhange with SS7 ?) So, best advice is, attempt build your own IVRS if you have to use analog CTI cards, and for DIGITAL CTI Cards, better contact some IVR Companies!

Keep reading this for CTI cards, IVR Software, IVR Companies and most importantly, how you can make money through IVR! It’s a hot thing