What is IVR?
IVR (“Interactive Voice Response”) allows computers and telephone systems to detect voice and keypad input.
Most of the enterprises have started adopting IVR to some extent or other – they either accept keytones or voice as input from the caller.
The most common form of IVR is auto attendant which is available in most PBX systems. The callers are prompted for the extension of the person they are trying to reach and the system would connect the call.
IVR Challenges
Challenges with IVR – costs associated with development and deployment
Deployment Costs:IVR has been expensive till last few years. With the advent of VoIP and increasing competition in telecommunications, the prices have decreased drastically.
Systems which took 6 months to develop and costed $250k to deploy are now readily available at a click away for $49.99/month. IVR Hosting reduces the associated upfront costs.
Development:The standards in the industry are VoiceXML and CCXML. CCXML is specific to systems developed on expensive Voxeo's platform. Developing using VoiceXML requires knowledge of phone systems and involves a learning curve of 1-2 months.
IVR-Hosting (Decreasing Costs)
Advanced IVR systems which can interpret standards such as VoiceXML are still expensive to maintain and deploy. Hence, IVR Hosting is becoming a standard as they are relatively very easy to deploy. The upfront costs are minimal compared to that of owning hardware IVR system from Cisco, Avayya and others.
Since VoIP and DIDs are becoming increasingly common and most offices are now running from distributed locations, IVR hosting has become a defacto standard for IVR deployment.
Invox Competencies
Invox features fully-loaded and extremely-fast drag and drop designer (Web 2.0). The 60 man year patent pending technology allows developers and administrators to easily build the phone system in few clicks.
Invox comes equipped with more than 50 different voice mashups. Extending them to suit your business requirements is just few hours work and does not require any additional coding or development.
For enterprises looking to integrate with backend database or REST web services, the out of box tools allow you to build powerful and full interactive, voice driven systems in just few hours. The learning curve is very minimal.
