IVR Systems Heading Toward the Cloud
October 22, 2012
By Rachel Ramsey, TMCnet Web Editor
When it comes to getting in contact with a company, customers today have multiple options. Despite growth in social media customer engagement, interactive voice response (IVR) systems are still one of the primary methods to which customers turn for complaint resolution.
Large and small businesses have adopted IVR systems because it saves money that would otherwise be spent on living, breathing (expensive) employees. An IVR system’s effectiveness is rated by the percentage of callers who ask to speak to a live operator: the lower the percentage, the more successful the system.
A recent article by Pupul Dutta, Express Computer, explains how legacy IVR systems will soon get a makeover with cloud-based solutions and mobile applications. Services like cloud computing-based IVR were expected to drive down costs and increase the speed of deployment of these systems.
Interact Incorporated is a provider of cutting-edge IVR solutions that have enabled its customers to change the way they do business, including custom programming, installation and support services, evaluating and enhancing existing systems or applications and rapid time to market. The company offers SPOT Media Platform, a cloud-ready platform that can be hosted in Interact’s cloud or any company’s cloud. It handles media resources such as voice, DTMF and video.
With inherent SIP and VoIP capabilities, the SPOT Media Platform provides enhanced media handling for large conferencing, audio streaming, and most importantly provides a development environment that allows you to make changes quickly and reliably.
Image via Interact
The company also offers Nimblevox, a Web-based solution that makes cloud communications easy with its hosted IVR, SMS solution, drag and drop service creation tool and APIs.
“Our cloud-based IVR service, Nimblevox, allows any organizations to easily create and deploy IVR and voice applications using our Hosted IVR and easy-to-use drag and drop service creation tool,” explained Katie Sheridan, marketing/sales support at Interact. “We take care of all the telephony provisioning and hosting, letting organizations focus on their application innovation. As an organizations needs change, their applications can also quickly be modified and re-deployed in a matter of minutes with the service creation tool.”
Nimblevox’s products include Hosted IVR, allowing customers to set up surveys, auto attendants and caller information. Its built-in automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech and answering machine detection is one of the most accurate and reliable speech recognition engines in the industry, and its text-to-speech offers the most realistic, natural sounding speech on the market.
“We’ve also partnered with LumenVox with their ASR and TTS engines,” said Sheridan. “They’ve won numerous awards for their ASR/TTS technology, so our solution provides one of the most accurate, reliable and natural sounding speech engines on the market.”
Both Nimblevox and SPOT Media Platform have customizable deployment options. They are adaptable in that while they are cloud-based services, the same solution and functionality can be deployed as an on-premises appliance solution for organizations that would prefer such an offering.
Edited by Braden Becker