Historically, IVR solutions have used pre-recorded voice prompts and menus to present information and options to callers, and touch-tone telephone keypad entry to gather responses. Modern IVR solutions also enable input and responses to be gathered via spoken words with voice recognition. IVR solutions enable users to retrieve information including bank balances, flight schedules, product details, order status, movie show times, and more from any telephone. Additionally, IVR solutions are increasingly used to place outbound calls to deliver or gather information for appointments, past due bills, and other time critical events and activities.
To deliver and properly leverage an IVR solution successfully, an enterprise needs to consider the following:
IVR platforms are the “server and operating system” hardware and software platforms on which IVR solutions run.
IVR platforms at a minimum provide the ability to play and record prompts and gather touch-tone input. IVR platforms may also offer the ability to recognize spoken input from callers (voice recognition), translate text into spoken output for callers (text-to-speech), and transfer IVR calls to any telephone or call center agent.
Telephone lines for IVR can be standard analog lines, digital T1, or digital ISDN lines. These lines are connected on one side to the IVR platform and, on the other, to call switching equipment including Telco switches, Voice over IP gateways, and corporate PBX’s; or in some cases, directly to call centers via an ACD.
Best-in-class hardware and IVR software are only the foundation. A team of IVR experts is needed to leverage this platform to address customer needs, streamline development and control operational costs.
This team should include employees and consultants who know IVR technology and challenges well. Ideally, IVR teams should include one or more members who have experience with IVR integration, configuration, reliability and redundancy, application development, and IVR solution deployment management.
ITel Enterprise IVR
ITel IVR Platform is an open, proven IVR platform that delivers the reliability and flexibility required by the most demanding IVR applications. Unlike traditional, proprietary IVR platforms, the ITel platform is based entirely on open Web and IP standards.
You can either purchase the ITel IVR Platform for use at your locations or pay a monthly charge to use the platform in our pre-deployed hosting facilities.
IVR applications can be developed quickly and easily. Again, unlike proprietary IVR platforms, the ITel platform uses VoiceXML and CCXML markup – much like the HTML markup found on every Web site – to deliver robust IVR applications that leverage your existing web infrastructure and experience.
Because the ITel IVR platform takes advantage of existing Web infrastructure and experience, you can re-leverage the work most enterprises have done to integrate the widest variety of back-end systems into Web application infrastructure.
And if you haven’t deployed web solutions yet, you can leverage the Web industry’s multi-billion dollar investment in web integration technology.
The ITEL IVR Platform works seamlessly with Telco switches, enterprise PBXs, Voice over IP deployments, and call centers via digital T1 and ISDN lines, SIP VoIP, and integrates with most leading call center platforms.
If you’d rather not waste time, patience, and budgets deploying reliable and scalable telephony infrastructure, our IVR Hosting is a great solution. We’ve pre-deployed thousands of lines and hundreds of servers so you can avoid the headaches of premise implementations.
The ITel team includes many of the most experienced, standards-centric IVR experts in the world. ITel was the first company to bring enterprise VoiceXML and CCXML IVR application hosting to market. To-date, over 100 customers and developers have created more than 1000 applications using our hosted platform. Our support team knows our platform inside and out, and will answer your questions in minutes to hours instead of days to weeks.