It's the kick-off of a long Memorial Day weekend, so let's take a few minutes to wrap up the week's events in interactive voice response (IVR) technology and services.

Customers, who have used an IVR, understand the typical frustrations like listening to never ending menu options, having to repeat information, with no option to speak to an actual human being. However, a well-developed, intuitive, user-friendly IVR system is an exception and can create an easy, frustration-free customer experience. Organizations utilizing IVRs and other voice applications have traditionally been forced to balance business costs and customer satisfaction. With this being said, how can businesses provide callers with exceptional customer service while leveraging the business benefits of voice automation?

Read more here.

How many ways can customers engage with you via your center? While the telephone, of course, is still the favorite method, there are so many others like awebsite via Interactive Voice Response (IVR), e-mail and chat, social media, telephone self-service, SMS and possibly video chat. It's great for customers, who expect to be given the same high quality of customer service regardless of which channel they choose. It is also nice for a company to be able to offer so many options, but a multichannel contact center platform that can help you gain and keep customers is an enormous challenge.

Reportlinker.com has announced the addition of new report on the global voice recognition systems industry. The report, Global Voice/Speech Recognition Systems Industry, gives a global outlook on voice/speech recognition systems. It provides a collection of market briefs, concise summaries and statistical anecdotes of research findings. There is growing demand for speech-based searching and analytics. This demand has given rise to growing popularity of network-based speech recognition and distributed speech recognition technologies. The report discusses not only this trend, but the increasing focus on voice Internet and speech-enabled systems by technology vendors.

What most of us know about court reporting we probably learned from movies and reruns of “Law & Order.” In these shows, a person sits near the judge and uses a mysterious machine to take down all that's said during the proceedings. It's a familiar image that's decades old, but in some parts of the world, it's starting to change, thanks to technology. In the high courts of Mumbai, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh (AP) and Delhi, India, it's not a person taking dictation during court proceedings. Each day, hundreds of thousands of dictations, court orders and petitions are dictated and converted to text documents using Nuance Communications’ (News - Alert) Dragon NaturallySpeaking software,

Read the article here.

IVR service provider companies play significant roles in improving customer interaction in call centers. IVR service not only helps call centers serve their clients better but also improve the efficiency of call centers by minimizing agents’ talk time. Though IVR service helps reduce interaction between call center agent and customer, it may still result in a prolonged wait on hold. To address this issue, Verizon (News - Alert) Enterprise Solutions and Virtual Hold Technology have developed a new service that eliminates wait on hold. Known as Voice Call Back, the service allows customers to skip the wait, hang up and receive a call back.