Genesys (News - Alert) Telecommunications Laboratories (Genesys) announced that Datamonitor has recently assessed it as one of the top two Interactive Voice Response (IVR) vendors shortlisted in its analysis report titled, “Decision Matrix - Selecting an IVR Vendor in the Enterprise.” 

"Genesys has high scores across the board in our IVR Decision Matrix due to consistent growth in its GVP business and its great reputation with a large installed base of IVR customers," said Aphrodite Brinsmead, lead author of the report and analyst for customer interaction technologies at Datamonitor.

GVP is the Genesys Voice Platform or Portal that is software driven, has touchtone functions, recognizes speech, and conforms to relevant standards such as Voice eXtensible Markup Language (VoiceXML (News - Alert)) for defining speech interactions between man and machine, Call Control XML for telephony support to VoiceXML, and Media Resource Control Protocol for managing speech processing devices that may be spread over several cities.

Datamonitor essentially evaluated IVR vendors on their technological capabilities, forward thinking, support of SIP and H323 standards, automated monitoring and reporting tools. Genesys apparently achieved the highest score of 8.25 out of 10. One of the important reasons for the high score was its procurement of VoiceGenie that was a VoIP, communications and IVR focused company.

"We were impressed with the next-generation applications Genesys is emphasizing. The release of its intelligent Customer Front Door (iCFD) framework is indicative of the vendor's forward thinking philosophy and commitment to extending IVR functionality," said Brinsmead

"Our iCFD solution gives us great self-service features we use to improve our customer service levels, drive operational efficiencies, and increase revenue," said Gerry Cools, Sales Strategy & Development Manager for Belgacom (News - Alert), the principal supplier of integrated telecommunications services in Belgium, and speaking on behalf of the Genesys IVR.

Genesys was rated within the top two positions for the following technology categories: switch integration, breadth of applications deployed, solution maturity, vendor strategy, platform features and capabilities.

Another factor was its market impact for which it was awarded the best score of 8.5. It constantly increased its customer base and consistently achieved more than 10 percent growth every year for the past five years. In revenues accrued it scored 9.0, customer size 7.0, vertical reach 7.0, geographical reach 9.0, and recognition 10.0.

Genesys also scored the second highest rating of 7.9 in the ‘end-user sentiment’ segment. It secured the top two ranks in most categories such as product quality (8.0), customer support (7.0), vertical specialization (8.0), portfolio depth (9.0), service levels (7.5), financial stability (8.0), client engagement (7.5), and end to end solution (8.0).

Cools added that iCFD helped reduce incoming calls by 1.1 million from 2007 to 2008 unobtrusively diverting calls to automated systems, increased customer satisfaction by 10 percent, and increased revenue capacity by three percent.

Similar IVR assessment and grading was earlier reported by TMCnet as a part of a much larger CRM effort by BenchmarkPortal.

The report says that companies are moving away from traditional IVR systems that have proprietary tools, all data collected in one storage area, do not interface consistently with other systems, require significant third party supervised deployment and maintenance, are difficult to replace and upgrade, have limited functionality, and high total cost of ownership.

It adds that clients now prefer modern IVR systems that are cheaper in all aspects, easier to deploy, integrate seamlessly with all other applications and communications platforms such as H.323 and SIP, are open source code based and primarily software driven, provide additional value add features such as built-in Customer Relationship Management to leverage potential business, and are easier to upgrade and replace.