What to look for when buying an IVR

Sabio’s Adam Faulkner outlines some key areas that organisations need to consider before embarking on IVR procurement.

At Sabio we strongly believe that the potential benefits of correctly designed and implemented IVR solutions still far outweigh any pitfalls. However, before organisations start to consider the wide breadth of functionality available – in terms of voice interfaces, multiple language support, natural language speech recognition, text-to-speech and CTI interfaces – there’s a lot of important infrastructure issues that they need to consider.

Importance of open standards

Perhaps the key recent shift in IVR technology has been the evolution away from proprietary touchtone IVR to emerging open-standard IVR platforms such as Voice XML . Acknowledged benefits of such an open standards approach include the ability to better take advantage of a Web infrastructure, the potential for improved functionality, and a more seamless transfer to speech technology to help improve routing, self-service capabilities and other transactions.

Datamonitor expects that across Europe and North America the market for proprietary IVR systems will decrease by some 35 per cent by 2009, while at the same time revenues for open standard Voice XML solutions will double, with the overall IVR market growing by almost 11 per cent. So why are open standards so important? Perhaps the biggest benefit is flexibility, as an IVR application written in Voice XML can be ported to pretty much any compliant platform, and when required can scale to whatever size is needed. If you’re a utility company that’s just trialed an application and now wants to roll it out across the customer base, or if you’ve just made a number of acquisitions and you need to integrate a significant volume of new customers, then this scalability can prove invaluable.

The potential of open standards can also give you more flexibility with your existing IVR suppliers. It’s unlikely that you’d want to immediately get rid of all your earlier proprietary IVR applications, and the goal should be to migrate them over time to an open platform. Voice XML’s flexibility can give you the technical and commercial leverage to broker more competitive pricing with your current suppliers.

Greater infrastructure choice

In the same way that Voice XML offers greater flexibility, the growth of IP networks and specific IP protocols such as SIP – the Session Initiation Protocol – and H.323 THIS DOESN’T MAKE SENSE? Traditional IVR ‘boxes’ were connected to the phone network as normal TDM circuits, creating an inflexible infrastructure that was often expensive to support. The latest open IVR systems can now be connected to an IP network via SIP or H.323 protocols, providing much more flexibility and scalability for the IVR system .

For companies with multiple IVR platforms this can have a significant impact on implementation. Instead of having IVR platforms at many different locations, organisations can now create centralised IVR server farms, taking advantage of the cost benefits of more powerful servers that now offer more efficient power consumption, resilience and scalability. Another key consideration here is the cost per IVR port. By virtualising IVR resources on the network, companies can work with IVR suppliers that offer more flexible licensing based on only those IVR ports actually in use at any given time - rather than the total number of ports across the network.

Enabling user-centred IVR applications

Once you’ve decided which IVR platform to go for and how to connect it to your network, you need to consider the actual IVR applications you want to deploy. While many IVR systems come with their own development tools, there are significant benefits to be gained by using one of the new generation of third party voice application management systems. Rather than just simply build functional applications, you can use third party tools to support the delivery of user-centred, high performance speech applications.

At Sabio we’ve found that working with development tools such as VoiceObjects helps us to create, test, deploy and analyse complex voice application services through a single, tightly-integrated development environment. One of the main problems with earlier IVR systems was that they typically required specialist IT support to add new applications or change existing ones – driving up costs and leading to inevitable delays in the roll-out of new systems. With the latest third party tools, however, it’s far easier to use and more cost effective to build voice applications.

Leveraging existing IVR investments

Other key considerations when procuring IVR systems include the number of interfaces that your system can support from a CTI middleware perspective. With Voice XML integration issues become much simpler, but there may also be a requirement to support other Web Services, .NET and ODBC applications. Organisations should also look at how SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) techniques can be used to leverage your earlier IVR applications within a broader Web Services environment.

It’s also important to think about how IVR systems are going to be integrated into your overall customer service infrastructure. In the past, IVR boxes have often been left to run in the corner of the IT room without any great thought about what was actually going on inside the box. Given that self-service now accounts for a growing proportion of most organisations’ customer interactions, the details of every single IVR customer interaction need to be logged and reported on using the same management reporting as other contact centre interactions – so don’t forget about reporting!