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, Plum Voice discussed the importance of IVR visual application mapping in a recent blog, explaining that by implementing visually intuitive mapping, one is better able to improve the customer experience by improving service delivery and gaining better insight into productions. By investing in such innovative visual application mapping tools as Plum’s QuickFuse application editor, you can easily eliminate the need to write with a single line of code to build whatever app you need.

The company then lists three simply steps to creating a working prototype of said app, beginning with a blank canvas and choosing from a list of modules (or what the company examples as “options and prompts like ‘start,’ ‘single prompt,’ ‘multipart prompt,’ ‘digits input,’ and ‘hang up’). You then drag the modules onto your blank canvas to build, and lastly, after dragging and dropping the modules, you wire them together – nodes to receptors, the blog details.

In other IVR news, we are given five proven ways to “make IVR rock” to avoid the bad reputation IVR technology can oftentimes get. By ensuring smooth and efficient operations, this negative perception can be overcome. The only way to overcome it, however, is by following these five suggestions, including keeping it simple, making the most out of your options, stocking up with trained and knowledgeable agents, avoiding getting trapped in the system/redundancy issues, and really putting the information gained during the IVR process to your best advantage and for the betterment of the customer.

Wrapping up this week is news revolving around how to better understand service level agreements (SLAs) for hosted IVR, as discussed in another recent Plum blog. The blog further prompts some questions and suggestions for hosted contact center managers to ask themselves and/or apply.

These include choosing private or public cloud, considering just how willing you are to “settle” for 99 percent uptime (whether uptime is more or less important than price), and if you do choose 100 percent uptime, the blog insists that you go all-out. “Companies seeking a long-term strategic solution that will be implemented at an enterprise level and will be mission-critical should seek comprehensive SLAs that guarantee uptime for service and support.”

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.