With the advent of newer self-service technologies such as the web and speech recognition, some feel that the days of touch-tone based IVR systems are over. We do not subscribe to this school of thought and feel that there is a place for these systems as long as the right applications are chosen for automation, the structure of the menus are well designed for ease of use and, of course, there is always an escape route to allow the caller to speak with a real person should they want/need to.
There are many hundreds of different touch-tone applications in use in the UK, systems are being used by many leading blue-chip organisations as well as smaller businesses. Whilst there are many different applications in use, the common theme companies focus on, when deciding what to automate is the replacement of routine and repetitive and mundane incoming calls to the business such as balance enquiries for telephone banking systems.
At CC, we have two areas of expertise. The first is around selecting the most appropriate hardware platform. The second, and in our opinion the most important, is designing an IVR application that will ensure both high customer acceptance and usage of the system.
