Articles on the ICT Industry in South Africa

Voice Response, by Jason Morris - Article Published on Ezine Articles

The term IVR is short for Interactive Voice Response, which is a telephony technology that allows interaction between callers and a phone system to acquire or enter information into a database. More and more companies are turning to IVR to help reduce the cost of common sales, service, collections, inquiry and support calls to and from their company.

Interactive Voice Response or IVR is one of the most common telephone functions in use across the business community and is capable of bringing remarkable benefits to your company. IVR systems allow 24 hour access to a company from its customers via its phone system. In today’s busy modern world, most callers expect on first contact with a company, to be handled via some kind of Auto Attendant or Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. This method of call handling is generally accepted as long as the caller is given ample opportunity to opt out of the IVR system and be able to speak to a live agent.

IVR systems offer a cost effective and money saving way of handling customer calls twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. The handling of routine phone requests for information can consume a substantial amount of company resources and ultimately money. Interactive Voice Response systems, tailored to a company’s requirements can provide much the same information as a live operator at a fraction of the cost both financially and resourcefully. To put things in their most simple form IVR systems let callers interact with your company via its telephone system.

IVR systems hugely reduce customer call handling costs, and can be introduced into your company environment in a number of ways. The most basic IVR systems simply allow you to record a message that is played when a customer presses the appropriate number on the phone keypad. The more advanced Interactive Voice Response systems allow callers to interact with a company on a much greater scale. For example you could set up an IVR to retrieve specific account information that is relayed to the caller through the implementation of text-to-speech recognition technology. This technology allows IVR systems to read specific information from a database and then relate that information back to the customer in spoken format.

KSS offers a Cisco IVR solution which is either a stand alone server based system which operates in conjunction with Unified Communications Manager. Alternately the IVR can be a sub component of Cisco IP Contact Centre Express where the IVR acts as a front end to the contact centre.