Recently, I came across an interesting article about usage of IVR in Economic Times, India. This was about simple outbound IVR used for monitoring one of the largest welfare scheme in India, Mid-day meal scheme. In this scheme, students in primary schools in India are offered free meals!

This welfare scheme has been successful in India and it has increased enrollment of students in primary schools, improved attendance as well as reduced drop outs.

Interesting Outbound IVR

According to the article, most populous state in India, Uttar Pradesh, is experimenting with IVR ( Interactive Voice Response) system to monitor implementation of Mid Day Meal scheme. After mobile phone boom in India, telephone connectivity has reached almost all villages, small towns in India. Outbound IVR makes outgoing to calls automatically during midday to teachers of primary schools and prompts to enter number of students present on that day. Their response is recorded using DTMF (Dual Tone Multiple Frequency) or telephone keypress and recorded in government website automatically.

This interesting outbound IVR application is implemented by Knowlarity Communications Pvt. Ltd.

This is another example of how IVR can used to monitor welfare schemes by governments.

What is Call – In – Sick ?
Call In Sick is some urgent absent notification by employees about their intended absence in office normally before start of office or at the beginning of it. Employees normally call to their superiors or leave a message with heir colleague.
This is common practice to “call in sick” to office at some point of time either due to genuine sickness or for some urgent personal reason. In India, any employees are granted few leaves in a year, known as CL ( Casual Leave).

Many large corporates with thousands of employees may get many ‘call-in-sick’ calls everyday. Receiving, recording all such calls and then providing information to respective superiors may become a tedious process for large corporates. IVR can be used as an effective tool to manage all “call-in-sick” calls. Presently, employees call their superiors or colleagues to inform about sickness and urgent requirement for unplanned leave for a day.

How IVR can be used ?

One dedicated number will be provided to employees for call-in-sick purposes. All employees will use this telephone number to report urgent leave of absence for the day.

1. As soon as employee calls to this number, IVR will ask to enter the employee number. IVR will then look up employee details as well as already availed casual leaves.

2. IVR will ask reasons for asking casual leave with most used reasons, like sudden sick, accident etc. For others, it will record a voice message.

3. Once the reason for asking casual leave is recorded, the notification of absence of the employee will be immediately notified to his/her colleagues as well as superiors.

4. IVR may even inform the caller if some urgent meeting was scheduled for the day and his presence in office is a must, or inform him his number of leaves taken for falling ill for the current month.

Some advantages of using IVR for managing Call In Sick :

1. Supervisors or seniors would instantly know if any of his juniors are absent as soon as they ope their mailbox and may even get SMS alert, instead of finding out physically. This will help him plan, depute in the absence of of the employee.

2. In any school, it becomes a night mare when one teacher call-in-sick, and no alternative arrangement is made quickly by school principal.

3. It allows keep track of absent employees daily basis.

4. Genuine call in sick employees can record their absence without having to call up the boss who might not be co-operative enough to understand and an IVR can surely save him from embarrassment of trying to convince his non-cooperative boss! IVR can even remind call-in-sick employees, how many times he/she had taken sick leave so far!

5. IVR can provide MIS report for departmental heads for call-in-sick by employees, day wise, month wise or employee wise for better HR resource planning as well as appraisals.

So, IVR could be used to record, manage all ‘call in sick’ employees without anyone’s involvement in the process. With futuristic feature like ‘Speaker recognition’, IVR might even be able to predict if the employee calling in sick is actually ill or not! This will be a real good feature departmental heads.

What is Click To Call ?
“Click To Call” normally refers to a website feature where an website visitor asks to talk to webmaster or website representative ( may be even call center) by entering his phone number. So, this Click to Call facility in a website mainly involves establishing a call between a website visitor and a representative or customer service agent. It may involve monitoring of website visitors in real time and dialing the phone number entered by the visitor manually. But using an IVR ( Interactive Voice Response), this process can be automated as well as many intelligence could be put to use!

There are many benefits of having Click To Call feature in an website in its contact us page or any page where a website visitor may need any further assistance ( for example, in e-commerce website while checking out, restaurant site for reservation enquiry etc.). Click to Call facility may reduce call waiting time for both the visitor and website representative as they are called/connected when both are free to talk on phone.

Another advantage of having Click To Call feature is privacy of telephone numbers. Company executives may not need to put their numbers on website. Since Click to Call normally calls both the parties and connect them, company executive may not give out his numbers. Conversation on phone also provides option to discuss customised pricing as well as it may increase visitor confidence.

These in turn may increase lead conversion with better online marketing analysis report.

Click to Call and IVR:

Click to Call feature in website can be thought of outbound IVR which transfers the call to another number as per some configuration.

Here is the flow, how outbound IVR may turn into Click to Call engine for any website, either onsite or hosted.

• Check if any new request from visitor for Click To Call feature. If any new request with valid phone number has arrived, go to step below.
• Check if the website representative or customer service agent is free, then call the visitor number.
• Call the website representative number.
• Connect both the calls.

One may use either call transfer or call bridging for connecting both the calls. In an on premise implementation, call transfer may work during office hours, but in case of hosted IVR platform, it will always be call bridging.

So, if you have already IVR system in your office, you might as well have Click To Call feature for your website which can be used to customer service, enquiry generation and conversion an online marketing analysis.

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.

800PBX Inc., USA has a very interesting IVR product. This is essentially an IVR Application that uses voice recognition for receiving customers calls and taking orders for pizza!

I found this quite interesting! Many a times, occasional Pizza eater like me, when I call up Domino’s Pizza, I get stumped by many jargn as well as various option and find no clue how to answer and prefer to hang up! But with Dial A Pizza (Restaurant) IVR Application will be of great help for people like us who will be able to listen the menu again and again ( which is not possible while talking to a live agent.) and try to understand and order the correct pizza.

800PBX offers toll free numbers too as the name suggests! They have offices in USA as well as in India. They have hosted IVR solutions.

Recent news article about 800PBX appeared on TMCNet.com from where I also got this information. Interesting quote as per the above article:

“A lot of automation is possible in the hospitality vertical,” said 800 PBX CEO Manohar Chapalamadugu. “It’s not just cost-driven, but quality enhancing as well.”
800 PBX Inc. provides virtual PBX and hosted IVR applications for both small and medium sized enterprises. 800 PBX specializes in IVR solutions like automated appointment scheduling, telephone orders, address captures and phone support systems.”’

For further reading or the full article, you can click here.