Timely information and timely action can earn a lot for any stock trading company or may lose for the lack of it! With advent of online share trading systems where anyone an buy/sell shares online using a PC with internet connection, lot of automation has taken place increasing profitability to any share trading companies.

Presently, many share trading companies maintains dedicated call center to serve their clients where many of the incoming calls are just to check their portfolio positions for the day! Also SMS ( Short Messaging Service) is being used to update both share trading tips as well as portfolio status to registered numbers.

IVR ( Interactive Voice Response) System can be used to perform regular enquiries like portfolio status, stock market update etc. which will free up human agent in call center for other tasks to assist actual stock trading assistance to callers.

Both Inbound IVR and outbound IVR can be deployed by any share trading company to automate timely information update to its clients as well as provide their portfolio status on demand.

1. Inbound IVR

Inbound IVR, where caller will make a call to the IVR number, can be used to provide the following updated and rea-ltime information :-

a. Portfolio Status
A quick information about the current portfolio status is what everyone wants to know at the end of the day or weekly to help plan then about buying or selling shares or doing other stock trading. Getting updates on IVR is much easier and its available on any phone both land-line and mobile.

b. Quick Stock updates
A caller can also hear latest stock exchange index, top performing companies, top loss making shares etc.

c. Call transfer to human agents
IVR can provide option to transfer the call to human agent intelligently like while announcing the top earning shares so that it may persuade them to do any transaction.

2. Outbound IVR

Outbound IVR can be used same wa as inbound IVR as described above,e except that the all would be initiated by IVR to the client.
The only difference is, the outbound call can be triggered when some important announcement or alert ha to be sent to the client. Some sudden fluctuation of share price owned by the client may trigger a call to him informing about the fluctuation and then IVR can immediately transfer the call to human agent for further assistance.

Voice call alert are more reliable as it can be ascertain either the call was received by the called party or not in time. In SMS alert or EMail alert, the client may not open the SMS or email in time which may cause him to miss the important update.

Outbound IVR is also useful to provide clients with timely stock tips which are very urgent in nature.

So, if you are in share trading business and if you are not using IVR, then most probably you are going to lose out to your competitor who is using IVR!

Apex Voice Communication, one of the major IVR based Service Delivery Plateform providers in the world, has announced about OMNILITE™, a menu-based web portal for customizing applications designed and developed in the graphically-based OmniView® Service Creation Environment. It works as a compliment to

APEXVoice Launches OMNILITE

“The OmniLite product is the direct result of requests voiced by a number of our mobile Network Operator customers with call and contact centers,” said Elhum Vahdat, Executive Vice President of APEX Voice Communications. “They need changes in the customer experience to be made in various departments on systems hosted by the IT or Engineering department, without the need to involve IT or Engineering and without affecting the stability of the underlying application.”

The OmniVox3D SIP Application Server is the core component of the APEX Service Delivery Platform (APEX SDP™), a mature, field-proven and future-proof platform that delivers immediate returns on the new generation of voice, video and data enhanced services. The APEX SDPs inherent design ensures the scalability, reliability and high-availability required by mobile and fixed-line Network Operators and Value Added Service Providers, while its award-winning OmniVox3D and OmniView offer the flexibility for rapid deployment of service bundles across multiple networks – 3G, SIP/IMS, TDM/SS7, AIN/IN and converged. The APEX SDP and OmniVox3D together can process an almost unlimited number of applications, including converged Web 2.0 and Telecom services (mashups), Self-Service Optimization (APEX First Touch™), Network IVR, Video IVR, Interactive Text Response (ITR), Voice/Video Messaging, Real-Time Billing (Prepaid), Voice/Video Conference Calling, and Automated Collect Calling.

About APEX Voice Communications (www.apexvoice.com, sales@apexvoice.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , +1 818.379.8400)
APEX is a global provider of Service Delivery Platforms and Application Servers to Network Operators, Value Added Service Providers (VASPs) and Value Added Resellers (VARs) for voice, video and data enhanced services. With over 15,000 installations across 95 countries since 1989, APEX continues to be a leader in delivering the latest solutions for mission-critical and revenue-generating enhanced services.

For complete Press Release : ApexVoice.

IVR system is not just a clubbing together of state of the art CTI boards, high end servers, very easy to drag and drop tool design IVR call flow for flexibility. One of the saddest part about IVR development is, the users may not appreciate about these technological break-through like SS7, ISUP, CPA ( Call Progress Analysis), accuracy and speed of speech recognition or the or intricacies involved in detecting disconnect tone, engage tone.

They simply care about what menus they hear and if the options they press or speak works! They are least bothered about the hard work some one may have put in to detect her key presses, or recognise heavily accented English numerals, but only if the IVR retrieves the information it promised in its menu. The appreciate only when they can understand the information read out to her listening first time without having to press a key to listen again!

It may not be possible to satisfy all the users of an IVR system, but by using well scripted menus in simple language and intelligently constructed sentences may surely help majority of the people to use IVR system without having to learn the IVR before using it.

The answer to all these problems faced by IVR users and making IVR more useful and user friendly is ‘scripting of the IVR menus’! Script writing for IVR means, writing the IVR menu options in simplest language, well formed sentence so that the listener understands the message accurately without having to concentrate.

IVR scripting can be used in three areas to improve IVR usability:-

1. Scripting the menus
2. Dividing complex menus to simple sub menus
3. Scripting the phrases used for providing information

1. Scripting the Menus

This is quite straight forward. The menu options where IVR gives some options to the IVR user to either press telephone keys, or speak some word or phrase, should be properly scripted. Accuracy of the options is of course a must and forgone conclusion. For example, if the menu says, “To transfer your call to a customer care executive, please press 9″, then on pressing 9 by the caller, the IVR should transfer the call to customer care executive, not to the main menu!

2. Dividing complex menus

Script writers will divide complex options or large options will divide into some groups, and make it two level menus, in place of one. This will not only help first time callers, but also make it more user friendly faster with using ‘cut through’ key pressing!

3. Scripting phrases

Now a days, IVR has to retrieve many information from various locations through either database look up or by using API. Also, it may have retrieve information in bits and pieces from different servers, then knit them together, and then finally produce a sentence which would present a complete required message/information to the IVR user! Now that may not be easy for an IVR engineer! So, one must use a professional script writer for writing these phrases either to be recorded or used with TTS.

Without proper scripts used in IVR menus and in information, IVR will not be usable at all, even by expert IVR users! It will be very frustrating for users and all the great technologies used to design and develop IVR system will completely go waste!

What is call back feature ?

Call Back feature is when a person call a number and then disconnect and immediately that dialed number calls back the person. Now the person can enter another phone number and get connected to that phone number! This kind of phone number which calls back a person is also known as DID ( Direct Inbound Dialing) or Direct Dial-in.

Implementing Call Back Service using IVR

Call back feature is implemented using a smart IVR ( Interactive Voice Response) System which performs three tasks :-

1. Detect caller ID and look up in a database if the caller id is a registered for call back service.

2. If the detected Caller ID is a registered user for call back service, then make an outbound call.

3. Once the Caller ID picks up the call, prompt for entering a phone number. The IVR then makes another out bound call to this entered phone number and bridge with the earlier call.

Recently, this kind of call back service is also available as web based service where a user just login to a website, enters his own registered number and then the other number with whom he wants to speak to. Call back service is used where direct dialing is costlier.

So, majorly call back feature is useful for lowering call cost or when a company does not want its subscribers for making support calls. Presently, most people use Toll Free number for this purpose. Toll free numbers are those numbers where caller does not pay, but the owner of the toll free number pays per minute charges.

But with falling outbound call rates as well as smart arrangement of outbound IVR arrangements, companies are now actively looking to use call back services instead of costlier toll free numbers.

A typical toll free number in India costs around Rs. 2.5/- per minute while an outbound call from a call center using outbound IVR and EPABX arrangement as I described in my earlier post about outbound Calling arrangement in India , per minute cost of making outbound call would be less than 45 paise per minute or completely free for small monthly subscription!

With this kind of cost advantage, many people are now receptive to the idea of using call back service instead of traditional toll free number. Apart from cost advantage, call back service offers few other advantages too :-

1. Since it is an outbound call with IVR behind it, it may call back at any time and record a message if there is no one to receive the call. In a toll free, either it will have to be received by some one or it will simply ring out without any record of it.

2. In a call center, iit is possible that Call Back will dial out the number while ensuring a customer care executive available to receive the call. It will increase customer satisfaction and can increase efficiency of customer care executives.

3. Many advanced feature could be implemented using the same IVR hardware.

So, if you are really looking to minimise your toll free numbers cost and maximise automation using IVR, most probably, it is time you look for call back service with smart Outbound IVR!

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 keep getting feedback/inquiries from various people asking about prices of CT(Computer Telephony) boards in India. Many people seem to quite puzzled to learn huge price ranges for similar boards with similar basic functionality. For example, depending on the manufacturer, one entry level model of one PRI ( E1) with 30 channels may cost anywhere between Rs. 10,000/- to Rs. 180,000/-.

Here is a price comparison :

CTI Board Street Prices in India

Though, I am unable to list prices of some other vendors here as well as CT boards with various capacities/configurations, but I hope the above list would be quite indicative. Dialogic with highest price tags still has the largest market share in a price sensitive market in India.

So, why is the price between the lowest and the highest CT Board is almost 10 times ? After all, a CT board is not ‘end product’ itself and it requires IVR applications or voice applications to provide the final solution.

Previously Chinese manufactured products were thought to be cheaper than products manufactured in other countries. But, Sangoma is Canada based company. Most probably, the basic difference between Sangoma and other boards is, Sangoma boards use processing power of HOST computer while other boards have on-board DSP ( Digital Signal Processors) to process various telecom protocol related functions. Many might argue that, with increasing MIPS in PCs, one should really not bother much about HOST PC processing for the CT boards too.

When one compares price of Dialogic boards with other cheaper cousins, one may wonder how can Dialogic survive in any price sensitive market ? I think here are the reasons :-

1. Dialogic has a huge developer base all around the world. After all, it is the oldest and biggest CTI company after merging with all its nearest rivals. It has very well documented APIs for all computer operating systems and lot of documentations available in internet for beginners.

2. Many RAD tools like VBVoice, OmniVox3D, Osidial etc. supports only Dialogic boards.

3. Most probably, Dialogic has the best support in CTI industry at present. They have very good support for both installation as well as developers.

The other cheaper alternatives like Sangoma, Digium etc. uses open source platform like Asterisk which has large developer community on net and growing. But, with almost 90% PCs in the world running on Windows Operating System, support of Windows is definitely a plus and with many RAD tools providers are surely competing well with Asterisk. For example, VBVoice is a toolkit which uses .NET! Now there must be millions of .NET developers in the world and when they find out VBVoice, they all become IVR developers overnight ( almost) and loyal fan of Dialogic boards as well.

Many people who are interested in IVR system, back out once they learn about the high price of CTI boards along with IVR software. The big price differences among similar boards confuse them more.

I have also attended mails from many engineering students interested in learning/doing college projects in CTI field and whenever I tell them price of 4 port Dialogic board, they always get discouraged. And when they ask for alternatives, I explain them about Asterisk based on Linux, they again get discouraged. Not many of them want to install Linux on their PCs. Almost everyone is very happy with their Windows machines.

So, I feel, Donjin and Synway are uniquely placed with their competitive pricing, good C++ Windows Based API. They have reasonably good support for developers.

There are few parameters or features of IVR which are important and are common to almost any type of IVR application. These parameters play very important role in making the voice application more user friendly. These parameters are used at many stages in IVR software or in any call flow. I hope, knowing these would help people who are looking to develop an IVR or looking to purchase IVR software.

These are very small parameters, but they may play crucial role in reducing call abandon rate in IVR. Some of them are :-

1. Allowing or not allowing caller to press a key while IVR plays the menu options

IVR may be configured to accept or to reject any key press while caller is listening the menu options. Allowing to press key during playing of menu allows caller to ‘cut through‘ the IVR menus and reach his desired IVR stage or menu quickly. But it may also increase chances of wrong key press, specially when some menus options are changed. Many regular caller may not like to hear known menus again and again.

2. Duration to allow a caller to press any key or voice command

Waiting time for callers key press or voice command may become crucial. During wait period, IVR does not play anything and become silent, so if this wait period is too long, caller may think the IVR is not responding, so disconnect the call.

3. How many times to play a same menu and number of attempts to choose correct menu options

Naturally, people make mistakes while pressing key or may make mistakes intentionally. So, it is important to decide the number of attempts one may try for each and every menu options. This kind of parameter may be required even while accepting some valid input from caller, for example mobile number, customer ID, complaint ticket etc. If this is not defined, then some caller may occupy some channel of the IVR unnecessarily.

4. Confirming menu menu selection of digit (s) pressed or voice command spoken

It is an important decision to make. Should IVR confirm every menu choice made by caller or not! Even in any software, when some one tries to do some important task, it pops up an confirmation window, similarly, IVR also ask confirmation for menu choice! But it may also irritate IVR caller. When using ASR ( Automatic Speech Recognition), confirming every option may become a necessity rather than a choice.

5. Inter-digit pause while expecting more than one DTMF keys as input from caller.

While caller enters multiple digits as input to the IVR, for example, credit card number, phone number, ID number, the duration of pause in between two consecutive DTMF digits or key press is important. Very long inter digit pause may result caller disconnect.

6. Using # ( hash) or star (*) keys to terminate

Deciding to use # or * keys to end entry of multiple digit is a good option. But these keys may also confuse some people who do not know about # or * keys as many of them do not use these keys. In India, many land line phones do not have # key. But with penetration of mobile phones, one may expect people to know about these keys.

These parameters are quite common and many developers use some configuration files or provide user friendly forms to configure.

Happy holidays season and Happy New year 2010 to all readers in general and visitors to IVR Blog during this holiday season in particular.

In case you wanted to read few useful articles about interactive voice response (IVR) system, here is a list of recommended articles :-

1. IVR as CRBT(Caller Ring Back Tone).
2. Choosing a CTI board for your IVR.
3. Choosing right IVR development tool .
4. Usability Tips for IVR Software.
5. Predictive Dialer and IVR.
6. Using Predictive Dialer smartly in Call Center.
7. List of RAD tools for IVR development.
8. IVR for making money .
9. Technical challenges in voice portal.
10. Use IVR as e-commerce portal.

I hope these articles will keep you busy while I will be back next year, 2010!

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!

In my previous post on IVR as E-Com Portal , I tried to explain how IVR can be used to generate revenue. In this post, I would try to list the some services, which should be interesting and likely to generate revenue. I think, it would be best if the IVR e-com portal is operated either on a toll free numbers or on a normal telephone number without any premium charging. Normally, voice portals provide the services free while charging premium for the call.

1. Direct Selling
One would be surprised to know that, many products, services could be sold on IVR. Few such products or services are :-
a. Music CD/Albums :
One can build a complete music store on IVR. The obvious advantage on operating a music store on IVR is ‘listening trailers’ on the fly! Callers would find it very easy to search any music number or album by language, genre, singer, films etc. There can be many options how caller pay, orders DVD etc.

b. Tickets
Most probably, many people are aware about buying tickets on IVR system. One can sell flight ticket, railway ticket, bus ticket, movie tickets on IVR e-com portal.

c. Books
Books could be sold on IVR e-com portal easily and some excerpt could be read out to the caller about new arrivals of books!

d. Food
If Domino’s can sell pizzas on phone, why not you ? One can sell foods on phone with home delivery facility!

e. Branded Products
Normally all branded products need not be touched or felt or inspected personally! There are many such products which one can buy on phone. For example, why should one need to check anything about LUX soap or 1KG of Basmati Rice ?

There must be many more items which can be sold directly on phone. All those which can be sold on phone could be automated on IVR e-com portal!

2. Services
There are many services which an intelligent IVR can provide to people which could be sold on IVR e-com portal. Some of them are :-

a. Distance education
Paid courses could be made available on IVR. Also lectures by eminent professors, teachers could be made available to registered students from distance.

b. Paid consultancy on phone
Doctors, astrologers could provide consultancy on IVR E-com portal. The main advantage of IVR consultancy is anonymity and many people can explain on phone without any inhibition. Of course surgery can not be done on IVR E-com portal, but some appointment with a surgeon could be surely sold on IVR e-com portal.

c. Notification Services
IVR can notify anyone by calling up! So IVR e-com portal may provide this service either for registered paid member or per usage basis.

d. Bulk outgoing call services/On demand outgoing call services
I am quite sure, this is one area which is picking up and likely to grow more in coming years. With increasing penetration of phones, people want to travel less for sending their messages quickly to many people!

e. Advertising
Voice advertising is one area which may sell on IVR e-com portal.

These are few services, products, which I believe, can be sold on IVR e-com portal. There are various tools to develop an IVR portal using which one may develop IVR E-com portal quickly and easily.

Like any other businesses, success of IVR e-com portal will depend on many things and those are outside scope of this article. But, IVR e-com portal can surely work and generate revenue.