Keeping up with the top IVR news stories of the past week, TMC noted that according to company officials, Plum Voice, which sells Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and survey utility products, experienced “record growth again in 2011,” which goes down in the books as “the company’s best year ever.”

Plum officials specifically mentioned its cloud-based (hosted) IVR service, premise-based systems and telephone survey platform as responsible for the company’s record sales in 2011. In fact, it says, its combined service offering and “focus on improved phone-call automation rates for businesses” resulted in 70 new enterprise clients and a customer retention rate of 99 percent.

Numbers like that tell you two things: The company pays attention to customer service, and their customers know it and appreciate it. You don’t get those kind of one-year numbers without solid word of mouth, and you only get that if you have happy customers.

TMC (News - Alert) also wrote that the thing about Interactive Voice Response is that while, yes, it does save businesses a lot of time and money, it also saves the customers time too, when used correctly. Frankly this reporter prefers automated interactions when it’s simple information that’s needed.

But too many IVR systems are one size fits all, instead of having the capability to tailor to the customer. That’s the contention of IVR industry insider Jason Andersson, who wrote recently that it’s highly possible “self-service applications, such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR) solutions are looking at a slow painful death because of lack of innovation.”

Take grocery shopping. Wouldn’t it be nice, Andersson says, if you could walk into a grocery store arranged for you to fast-track your trip, with all the things you normally buy in the same place up front? Sure if you have the time go get an exotic mustard for a special dinner, but the bread, milk, beer, all that’s up front, easy to get.

And TMC noted that every business wants to know why a customer buys a particular product, especially if it’s their product. Identifying the key drivers of interactive voice response (IVR) using speech analytics is a crucial tool in discovering an organization’s best strategy.

According to this Bitpipe white paper, organizations are attempting to find the best intelligent and automatic way to comprehend why customers buy what they do. IVR could be a solution to objectively obtain results to help businesses learn what features customers are looking for without breaking the budget.

Speech analytics using IVR can review feedback from customers to supply an effective CRM (customer relationship management) transaction and financial information. This helps to correlate what customers are up to at the moment but not long term spending habits.