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Interactive Voice Response
IVR is one of the technology that many of my clients are not really aware of what it really consist of. Let’s take a look at wiki’s definition:-
In telephony, interactive voice response, or IVR, is a phone technology that allows a computer to detect voice and touch tones using a normal phone call. The IVR system can respond with pre-recorded or dynamically generated audio to further direct callers on how to proceed. IVR systems can be used to control almost any function where the interface can be broken down into a series of simple menu choices. Once constructed IVR systems generally scale well to handle large call volumes.
The difference between a simple automated attendant system (which normally have audiotext function as well) and IVR is this phrase “dynamically generated audio”.
Many people are misled by the name Interactive Voice Response System and thought that a simple automated attendant system is an IVR. Even though the automated attendant system can interact with the caller by playing different menus and transferring calls to different departments, the AA’s response is always fixed. An IVR on the other hand, is connected to and gets its response from a database. So for an IVR example of phone banking, your bank account amount will always reflect the exact amount of money you have in your bank at the time of your call.
So why is it important for you to know the difference? The cost of an IVR system is easily 5 times and more than an automated attendant system. I have seen vendors quote my prospects an AA system as an IVR, which eventually land the prospects in trouble. After spending time and resource on the installation, these prospects had only a few horrible options left when they realized that the AA could not do the IVR’s job. Some of them could get the new budget approved and get a real IVR from us. Some lucky ones managed to reject the AA and recover their downpayment, but gave up on the IVR project afterwards. But some had to go ahead with the AA and ended up with a system that could not do what they needed.
So remember, the devil is in the details when it comes to Computer Telephony Integration. When in doubt, do more research.