March 14, 2012
What Does a Restaurant Have to Do with IVR? Just Ask Plum Voice
By Susan J. Campbell, TMCnet Contributing Editor
Interactive voice response (IVR) systems are most often used to handle high call volumes when standard requests can be automatically directed to the right connection. The technology used in IVR allows companies to reduce cost per calls and provide more efficiency to the call process, which typically increases customer satisfaction.
According to this Plum Voice blog, IVR systems, share many similarities to the common web browser. For some IVR companies, the similarities are so closely aligned that they refer to their systems as voice browsers.
IVR was extremely complex and expensive in its infancy in the 1970s. They used DSP technology, which limited the vocabulary that it could decipher. But when it moved to a client/server architecture, more companies began deploying IVR with greater success at less expense.
One way of looking at IVR is that it is the middle player in the scenario that includes the phone and the company on the other end of the call. It’s similar to the scenario where the web browser is the middle player between the web and the computer.
Plum Voice, an automated telephony solution, likes to explain their IVR system in the context of a restaurant experience. The components of a restaurant start with a menu. You relay your preference to a waiter who takes it to the kitchen and submits the order to the cook. The cook takes the ingredients out of pantry and prepares the meal. Plum’s IVR platform is the menu.
The call flow application server is the waiter. The business logic server is the cook, and the pantry is the data storage device.Plum IVR systems are constructed on carrier-grade servers that are configured with spare drives, fans, and power supplies for added reliability. The solution is hosted, so it has the inherent scalability features that hosted solutions are apt to provide. But Plum’s hosted solution offers as little as four ports or up to thousands – whatever your company needs.
The Plum servers are built on VoiceXML (News - Alert) 2.0-certifed and 2.1 compliant platforms, which allow a choice of speech synthesis and speech recognition engines in many languages. For those companies with a own Linux servers, Plum offers its software as a stand-alone.Plum’s professional services for its IVR solution make it the leading provider of custom IVR. The company’s engineers have a wide breadth of knowledge in a many different industries that make them experts at deploying and managing IVR for just about any type of company. When it comes to deployment times, the company says “we never miss our dates.”
Edited by Juliana Kenny
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