I have many experiences with my clients or people whom I had interacted during their commissioning of IVR system, that they give least importance to the scripting as well as voice prompt. Most of the times, they discuss and emphasis on number of simultaneous calls, integration of the IVR with some CRM ( customer resource management) system or some other interesting IVR feature as well as its future expansion as well as maintenance. Nothing wrong for emphasizing on these aspects of IVR system, but after commissioning of the IVR, they have started changing the script as well as voice prompts many times over!

Many of clients have started out with TTS ( Text To Speech ) generated voice prompts and later ended up recording voice prompts by different artists in a studio! I have also seen some call center owner as well as some companies deploying voice recorded in office by some female staff using a PC and MIC, and putting the IVR into production. Invariably, they changed the voice prompts to studio recorded voice prompts from professional artists after one month or so!

While in some cases use of TTS ( Text To Speech) is inevitable or a must ( like retrieving dynamic data from database and playing them out), but there is no reason to use TTS or TTS generated voice prompts fixed menus, numerals as well as fixed names!

I would always advise people to use professionally recorded voice prompts in any IVR in production environment. While use of TTS generated voice prompts during testing and development phase makes sense, but in production, TTS should be avoided. Here are few reasons why one must use professionally recorded voice prompts only :-

1. Voice prompt is the only interface to the caller

In IVR system, voice prompts are the only direct interface with the telephone caller and telephone caller has no means to know about other aspects of the IVR system. A caller to an IVR system is not bothered about the technology behind the IVR system, or use of API ( Application Programming Interface) based on latest web technologies to fetch the required information for the caller at the back end. The caller is just bother about his required information and how quickly he could access it and how easily he could listen and understand without having to press any key to listen again!

2. Professional Voice Prompts gives seriousness to the IVR system

For many call center as well as customer service and support, IVR is the one which picks calls from every caller including the irate and fed-up callers! Professional, clear and pleasant voice ( I avoid using the word female) may have good effect on the caller and it may give indication to him what he may expect from the call! Unprofessional and difficult to understand voice prompts may scare away the caller or make him more non-cooperating irate customer!

3. Voice Prompts may make IVR caller experience pleasant

A clear and pleasant voice with understandable accent as well as pronunciation will surely increase user experience as well as satisfaction of the caller! A person may call to the IVR from a noisy background area and that will compound his problems in understanding IVR voice prompts or menu options if TTS generated machine prompts are used.

A professional voice prompt provider will always make the voice prompt in proper volume, speed, pitch as well as pronunciation which are a must for any production grade IVR system.

So, in order to improve usability and caller satisfaction, one should use services from a professional voice prompt provider, or at least use voice prompts recorded in studio by professional voice over artist.

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!

Recently, I came to know that Airtel ( Mobile Service provider in India with largest number of mobile subscribers, around 135 millions) charges caller to its mobile subscribers at the Rs. 0.5 per 3 minutes when they call their helpline number ( customer care) and speak to

AIRTEL Charges for speaking customer care

I think the logic behind Airtel charging customer for ‘talking’ human agent/customer care executive is to discourage subscribers speaking to human agent and encourage using the ‘self help’ or ‘Do It Yourself’ IVR right from booking any complaints to find out any information about Airtel. This will surely help them reduce ‘human agents’ in their call centers and bringing down cost of operation further. Also, there may have been many spam calls and this kind of charging may help them reduce these spam calls.

But, few questions remain:-
1. Have Airtel/Other mobile operators done any usability tests on their ‘self help IVR System’ ?
2. Have they done any bench marking of IVR abandon within calls ?
3. Is their IVR system can solve any kind of problems faced by their customers ? How about genuine customers who face some genuine and ‘new problems’ IVR does not have menu option for it ?

Though most of the times, the complaints or problems faced by customers are similar and can surely be automated using a well designed IVR which can fetch all data related to the caller, but thinking IVR is sufficient enough to solve all kinds of problems is quite ambitious!

It is true that Indian masses are not educated enough to use IVR for lodging complaints as well as intelligent enough to navigate through the menus provided in any customer care IVR, but in order to force them use of IVR by charging when they opt to speak to human agent too does not look a logical step. Instead of charging customers, Airtel could to usability test on their IVR and find out reasons for abandoning IVR and then try to improve its usability!

Servicing its huge subscribers of more than 135 millions using IVR would have made a good case studies and bench marking of IVR usability. Airtel also provides large number of value added services apart from its basic telephony services, so one can expect its customer care IVR to be quite complex. Apart from this, add 22 languages in 23 circles it operates, to its difficulty!

So, one can expect customer care IVR of Airtel to be quite complex browsing through complex menu options starting with language selection to service selection. But in India, being home to 300 million ( almost equivalent of total population of USA) of illiterate people, it may not be possible to expect them to know their service names which would be announced in IVR menus to choose.

Though I would rate IVR in Airtel customer care to be fairly good, but still, charging customers for speaking to customer care executive is beyond my comprehension. There might be some spam calls though and charging may deter and decrease this kind of spam calls, but it also penalizes the genuine calls/callers.

I have sent an email to Airtel asking about their usability test/benchmarking of IVR. When I get answer, I will update this post.

UPDATE : I got call from Airtel PR department and they had explained that this decision of charging callers for speaking human agent was taken collectively by COAI ( Cellular Operators Association of India ) and approved by TRAI. The charging has started from Feb 2010 only and according to them, all other operators have also started charging and if they have not done so far, then they would do soon.
As for the IVR usability issue, they did not have any data about IVR abandonment and I assume they do not have much idea about IVR usability.
According to them, any further communication regarding this ‘charging for talking to customer care executive’ and IVR usability, COAI is the right organisation and forum to discuss.

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.

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.

VUI ( Voice User Interface) is the call flow of IVR system. Usability of IVR is dependent on the VUI. So it is desirable that considerable amount of time be devoted in designing, testing and documenting VUI of IVR system before actually developing IVR system.

Here are few simple VUI design guidelines of tips I have thought of :

1. Identify specific purpose of IVR system
First step towards designing VUI should be the question, why would a caller call the IVR system and how quickly efficiently IVR should reply to his “why”. If the purpose of an IVR system is to record customer complaint, allow customer to lodge their complaint in the first menu itself. IVR should not try to act very smart or human by asking intelligent questions and get the caller answer before it actually is able to lodge the complaint. The other way is to allow the caller lodge the complaint, provide him complaint ticket and then ask few polite questions about details of the his complaint an which is completely optional. IVR system should stick to its specific purpose in its operation.

2. Maximum 3 Levels of menu
Stick to maximum 3 levels of menus before caller gets his desired information after calling a IVR system. A caller should not be “interviewed” or put through “set of question answer session” till he gets the desired information. In many IVR system, it is observed that, trying to be smart, caller is put through set of questions, many irrelevant options before actually providing the information required by the caller. So, golden rule should be, provide maximum 3 levels of menu, before a caller is answered or provided the final information.

3. Provide Shortcuts as per usage
IVR system should have in-built MIS (Management Information System) to enable finding out the most used menus and information. Depending on the usage, shortcut should be provided to access the widely used menus quickly. Many repeat caller will not like to go through the same menu and having to choose same options before his desired menu options. Even a first time caller may like to use the shortcut once the shortcut is explained.

4. Top Level Menu options
By top Level Menu options, I mean the menu options provided to caller as soon as his call is answered. This is the menu which is to be designed very carefully and success of IVR system may depend on this menu to a large extent. This menu should not be long list of options, but few main specific purposes of the IVR system. And this menu should be changed as per usage statistics. For example, if the 4th option here has less usage than 3rd option of the second level option of 1st top level option, than most probably, it is time to bring the second level option to top level menu. If the IVR system is a call center and human agent is available, then I strongly suggest that option should be given to caller in Top Level menu to speak to a human agent.

5. Voice prompts
Voice scripts should be simple English or the language the IVR is using. The language should be really simple and easy to understand, without any grammatical errors. It should be spoken as if you are speaking in daily conversation with regular pauses. A good menu design may look totally ridiculous if proper scripting and voice prompts are not used.

There are five VUI design tips I have been using in all my IVR works. VUI is a must for IVR usability.

Recently I met a client who was in a hurry to get an IVR Software developed for his business. But while discussing specification of his IVR Software, he was very keen on documenting and finalising the IVRS call flow as he thought it will waste precious time and will delay the IVRS development, but I insisted that, before actually starting coding IVR software, we must completely document the whole call flow. I had to cajole him, explain him why call flow is required and a must for any customised IVR software! Finally he agreed and gave us few days for documenting call flow in tight schedule of his IVR development.

When we submitted him our first draft along with our suggested improvement in call flow as per usability point of view, he told us,” thank you Uttam for insisting on call flow, now I can see why you insisted in preparing the call flow before actually do the development. I totally agree with the changes in the call flow and most probably, I would have asked you to make the changes after I would have checked by dialing to the IVR.”

While I was happy to hear those nice words, I thought I should try to write benefits of IVR call flow. They are:

1. While IVRS is sequentially processed, if call flow is available, required option can be spotted quickly in IVR call flow. Caller or user does not have to listen out whole list of options to know which option he has to choose for his required information. This is particularly helpful for new caller.

2. To examine usability of IVRS, call flow is the document to consult! With call flow, one will know if the options are read out properly, and how they are presented to caller. One can check without actually calling to the IVR.

3. With the help of call flow, scripting of prompts to be used in the IVR System become much easier and it will improve IVR usability.

4. A call flow will help database design required for IVRS.

5. It is easy to make changes in call flow, but changing actual flow in IVRS may require changes not only in coding, but also in scripts, prompts audio files. It is time consuming, more work for developer as well as script writers as well as voice artist.

6. Call flow will help identifying and setting up milestones in IVR software development. It will reduce many avoidable alterations, changes after coding.

There will be other benefits too which most probably I am unable to recollect at this point of time, but I will update this post as soon as I recollect them.

As expected, the first list of IVR companies left out many companies. Last few days, I have found few more companies and I thought I would list them here before I forget. One day I hope to build whole directory of IVRS Companies .

Here it goes :

30. Prosodie Interactive Inc.
31. Canny Infotech
32. Metafor Solutions Inc.
33. Silicon Valley Infomedia Pvt Ltd.
34. TCMS Corp .
35. IVRS Development
36. Syntellect Inc.
37. Kleward Consulting Pvt. Ltd..
38. Westat, Inc
39. Tranx Continental Technologies.
40. Camrivox Ltd.
41. VXL Technologies

Adding some more IVR companies today 2nd July 2009 :-

42. SQUADM Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
43. GAYTES Information Systems Private Ltd.
44. 5G TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS PVT LTD
45. The Plum Group, Inc.
46. DEEPIJA TELENETWORKS
47. Redwood Technologies Ltd
48. S.K. InfoTech Pvt. Ltd
49. VSR
50. 360CompuTel
51. CTI Pro
52. APEX Voice Communications, Inc.
53. Datatel Communications Inc (USA)/ Datatel Inc (Canada)

I am sure, I have not added many companies yet. But this list will continue! I request my esteemed readers to kindly add to this list of IVR companies. Thank you in advance.