A lot has been going on in the interactive voice response (IVR) space. From new releases to the latest trends and insights, this is all of the most interesting IVR-related news of the week!

This week, the importance of IVR for ensuring efficient communications was highlighted in light of the destruction of Hurricane Sandy. Plum Voice highlighted an article this week via one of its blogs stressing the equal vitality of IVR technology in addition to landline phones.

“IVR systems can relay prerecorded, geo-coded messages to residents based on physical location,” Plum explained. “Since landlines often still work long after the power has gone out, utilizing interactive voice response technology in combination with landline phone systems can offer the best way to communicate during a disaster, and can help in keeping people safe and sound.”

In other news, I was able to speak with David Baker, VP of Servion, about what should be on every contact center manager’s holiday wish list this year. While consumers everywhere gear up for snagging serious deals, contact center managers everywhere have a far larger concern – ensuring efficient customer service during arguably the two busiest shopping days of the year, Black Friday (News - Alert) and Mega Monday.

What Baker suggests is that contact center managers rather invest in high quality technology – specifically IVR – instead of tacking on additional seasonal contact center agents. Many organizations mistakenly think that tacking on seasonal agents is an end-all solution to handling heavy call volumes, but in actuality, this can be quite detrimental to business. Conversely, adding or enhancing your contact center’s technology is key to ensuring customer satisfaction and business continuity. 

Wrapping up this week is news regarding the state of IVR in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) as well as Asia. According to a Plum Voice blog, hosted IVR is becoming increasingly popular in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and is also growing in popularity in Europe and Asian markets.

“As speech applications continue to gain popularity throughout the global marketplace, the demand for hosted IVR is expected to continue to grow. As companies like Plum Voice are able to reach out to some of these untapped markets, companies located there are able to expand their own offerings and thus leverage new opportunities,” Susan Campbell writes in the article, found here.

That’s going to do it this week for the latest IVR news. To see what’s new next week, be sure to check back in same time, same place – only here at TMCnet.