Recently, I came across a news of phasing out of government managed call center in Indian city, Jaipur, aimed at providing single-window facilities for civic issues like sanitation, water supply and road repair etc. The reason for phasing out of the call center is due to less number of calls and huge burden of cost for running the call center! Quite logical!

Jaipur: The much-hyped call centre, which was launched in August 2008 to provide singlewindow facilities for civic issues like sanitation, water supply and road repair etc, may be phased out soon. The centre seems to be economically unviable and a huge burden on the government. Moreover, the Jaipur Development Authority (JDA) has to dish out Rs 2.5 lakh every month for a few hundred calls.
During a review meeting chaired by directorate of local bodies (DLB), director Jogaram said in the last one month it was found that running the call centre was an expensive affair. “As the coordinator of the centre, we found that we need to make the centre costeffective. Therefore, we have decided to reduce staff strength by June 1, 2010, besides some other corrective measures,” Jogaram said. Source : Times Of India.

While, any intelligent IVR ( interactive voice response) system should have been enough for providing information as well as registering any request from its citizen, government agencies went ahead with implementation of call center! Most probably, IVR companies in India are not promoting features and functions of IVR systems in India!

Providing information about various government agencies like JDA ( Jaipur Development Authority) about water supply, sanitary problems, road repair etc. are routine job and any IVR could have been used without having to make recurring expenses.

IVR can also be used easily to automate registering of any kind of complaints along with caller ID as well as recording voices. These recorded voices could be emailed as voice mail attachment along with complaint ID number to concerned officials automatically. Status of complaints could be changed by concerned official and the status could be provided by caller on IVR without the complainant having to visit the office as well as interacting any official. This will not only increase efficiency of government employees, but also save resources and recurring expenditures.

Though in other parts of India, some government agencies are using IVR, but it is yet to become mainstream. With ever increasing telephone and mobile users in India, features and functions of IVR technology should exploited to provide public utility services.

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.

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.