15-07-2011, 09:36 AM
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INTRODUCTION
What can be done using an Inter voice System?
When connecting an Inter-voice system into telephone lines (either analog lines or digital T1/E1 trunks), the applications can handle either incoming or outgoing calls and then perform the following voice processing features:
• Provides unlimited pre- recorded voice messages
• Live recording of customer messages
• Accesses or stores information to and from the back-end host, database or the Internet
• Uses leading speech recognition technology to process either spoken words or full Sentences.
Who should use Inter voice?
Using Inter voice hardware and software, we have developed voice automation applications, which can:
• Transfer the customer calls to the right people to handle
• Provide the most updated product or service information
• Record customer messages for follow up later
• Perform automated transaction processing without human intervention.
What are interactive voice response (IVR) systems?
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems allow callers to interact with the communications system over the telephone. IVR is used to enable the caller to retrieve information from a database, enter information into a database, or both. IVR systems allow the user to efficiently exchange information, reducing clerical processing.
How It Works?
An IVR system talks to callers following a recorded script. It prompts a response to the caller and asks him to respond either verbally or by pressing a touchtone key, and supplies the caller with information based on responses made.
What are important features of IVR systems?
IVR system should store responses made by callers. Should be able to provide different responses to callers based on time of day called. Should be able to capture either touch-tone or voice responses by callers.
1.1 Aim Of The Project
We have decided to choose this topic “IVRS” because
• IVRS is a Acronym for Intelligent Voice Response System
• The system used is Intelligent for Interaction
• Will consider the nature of the user, to provide the correct response.
• And will provide the user with all sorts of related information for his concern So we have decided it to implement this system for educational purpose i.e. marks enrollment.
1.2 BRIEF HISTORY OF IVRS
CALL centres originated as a cost-cutting measure by US companies several decades ago, but they only really started to take off in the UK in the 1970s. The initial centres were in-house operations in larger organizations and they tended to share and be formed by the same basic assumptions and drivers. The idea was that if you could cluster the majority of telephone based contacts with the customer in a single department you could have people focused just on call-related services. Several advantages would follow. First, as a coherent department focused on telephone services, such a ‘centre’ could be managed more coherently. A second motive was that through careful management of the centre, you would inevitably get the benefit of having more calls handled by fewer people. Steve Morrell, Managing Director at Contact Babel, an organization that specializes in analyzing the call centre market, points out that this early focus on ‘efficiency’ and cost cutting, in a sense, got the call centre industry started off on the wrong foot - at least in relation to current ‘best practice’ "It meant that the whole industry focused on measuring things such as call lengths, or time to resolution. The faster the operator could complete a call, the more efficient and effective the contact with the customer was deemed to be," he explains. Divide the number of calls by the number of operators, and you could see at a glance how ‘efficiently’ your centre was operating.
The bigger the number, the better. The shorter the call duration and the shorter the time to resolution, the better. There were obvious problems with this approach. First, it led to a ‘sweat the agent’ attitude, since the pressure was on to set call centre agents more and more ‘stretching’ targets by way of calls per hour that they were supposed to complete. Second, it led to a high turnover in staff as people became burned out by the pressure cooker atmosphere.
Since the costs of training a call centre agent are not trivial (Morrell puts them at around £6,000 per agent on average), a high staff turnover leads to high costs. A third issue, which took rather longer for companies to grasp, was that agents were not being given the opportunity to learn very much about the customer, or to add much value to the customer’s relationship with the organization. In fact in many instances an emphasis on keeping call times as brief as possible would actually cause the agent, at best, to sound impersonal and unsympathetic to the customer. At worst the experience would be decidedly unsatisfactory and would possibly do lasting damage to the company’s brand and reputation in the customer’s eyes.
Morrell points out that call centres were given a huge boost in the UK in the 1980s when telecoms deregulation led to a fall in the price of fixed line calls. Channeling contact to the customer through the telephone became an even more cost effective option for companies. Since the UK led the way in telecoms deregulation in Europe, this was a major factor in the UK having more call centre seats than any country with the exception of the US. We currently have in excess of 800,000 call centre places across currently have in excess of 800,000 call centre places across the UK, and the number is projected to go beyond 1,000,000 within the next three years.
Colin Mackay, a Director of the industry body, the Call Centre Managers Association (CCMA), points out that pioneering centre set up by Direct Line and then by First Direct, proved how powerful these centres could be for financial services organizations. "It meant that they could reach large numbers of the public without the requirement for sales people on the street," he said.
As Mackay notes, about 80% of the questions that people have about financial services products, from mortgages to loans and insurance, can be answered over the phone, without the need for a face-to-face meeting. Operations such as Direct Line were able to demonstrate considerable cost savings and efficiencies over conventional financial services product distribution strategies. Scotland and the north-east of England did very well out of the first two decades of call centre operations in the UK. As Mackay explains, call centre operators tended to favour regions outside the expensive south-east of England, where building premises were far cheaper, and where there was a reasonably well-educated potential work force. The fact that the north-east of England and Scotland had seen a massive decline in their heavy industries meant that there was also competitive pressure for jobs, so wages were more competitive too, than down south.
INTRODUCTION
What can be done using an Inter voice System?
When connecting an Inter-voice system into telephone lines (either analog lines or digital T1/E1 trunks), the applications can handle either incoming or outgoing calls and then perform the following voice processing features:
• Provides unlimited pre- recorded voice messages
• Live recording of customer messages
• Accesses or stores information to and from the back-end host, database or the Internet
• Uses leading speech recognition technology to process either spoken words or full Sentences.
Who should use Inter voice?
Using Inter voice hardware and software, we have developed voice automation applications, which can:
• Transfer the customer calls to the right people to handle
• Provide the most updated product or service information
• Record customer messages for follow up later
• Perform automated transaction processing without human intervention.
What are interactive voice response (IVR) systems?
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems allow callers to interact with the communications system over the telephone. IVR is used to enable the caller to retrieve information from a database, enter information into a database, or both. IVR systems allow the user to efficiently exchange information, reducing clerical processing.
How It Works?
An IVR system talks to callers following a recorded script. It prompts a response to the caller and asks him to respond either verbally or by pressing a touchtone key, and supplies the caller with information based on responses made.
What are important features of IVR systems?
IVR system should store responses made by callers. Should be able to provide different responses to callers based on time of day called. Should be able to capture either touch-tone or voice responses by callers.
1.1 Aim Of The Project
We have decided to choose this topic “IVRS” because
• IVRS is a Acronym for Intelligent Voice Response System
• The system used is Intelligent for Interaction
• Will consider the nature of the user, to provide the correct response.
• And will provide the user with all sorts of related information for his concern So we have decided it to implement this system for educational purpose i.e. marks enrollment.
1.2 BRIEF HISTORY OF IVRS
CALL centres originated as a cost-cutting measure by US companies several decades ago, but they only really started to take off in the UK in the 1970s. The initial centres were in-house operations in larger organizations and they tended to share and be formed by the same basic assumptions and drivers. The idea was that if you could cluster the majority of telephone based contacts with the customer in a single department you could have people focused just on call-related services. Several advantages would follow. First, as a coherent department focused on telephone services, such a ‘centre’ could be managed more coherently. A second motive was that through careful management of the centre, you would inevitably get the benefit of having more calls handled by fewer people. Steve Morrell, Managing Director at Contact Babel, an organization that specializes in analyzing the call centre market, points out that this early focus on ‘efficiency’ and cost cutting, in a sense, got the call centre industry started off on the wrong foot - at least in relation to current ‘best practice’ "It meant that the whole industry focused on measuring things such as call lengths, or time to resolution. The faster the operator could complete a call, the more efficient and effective the contact with the customer was deemed to be," he explains. Divide the number of calls by the number of operators, and you could see at a glance how ‘efficiently’ your centre was operating.
The bigger the number, the better. The shorter the call duration and the shorter the time to resolution, the better. There were obvious problems with this approach. First, it led to a ‘sweat the agent’ attitude, since the pressure was on to set call centre agents more and more ‘stretching’ targets by way of calls per hour that they were supposed to complete. Second, it led to a high turnover in staff as people became burned out by the pressure cooker atmosphere.
Since the costs of training a call centre agent are not trivial (Morrell puts them at around £6,000 per agent on average), a high staff turnover leads to high costs. A third issue, which took rather longer for companies to grasp, was that agents were not being given the opportunity to learn very much about the customer, or to add much value to the customer’s relationship with the organization. In fact in many instances an emphasis on keeping call times as brief as possible would actually cause the agent, at best, to sound impersonal and unsympathetic to the customer. At worst the experience would be decidedly unsatisfactory and would possibly do lasting damage to the company’s brand and reputation in the customer’s eyes.
Morrell points out that call centres were given a huge boost in the UK in the 1980s when telecoms deregulation led to a fall in the price of fixed line calls. Channeling contact to the customer through the telephone became an even more cost effective option for companies. Since the UK led the way in telecoms deregulation in Europe, this was a major factor in the UK having more call centre seats than any country with the exception of the US. We currently have in excess of 800,000 call centre places across currently have in excess of 800,000 call centre places across the UK, and the number is projected to go beyond 1,000,000 within the next three years.
Colin Mackay, a Director of the industry body, the Call Centre Managers Association (CCMA), points out that pioneering centre set up by Direct Line and then by First Direct, proved how powerful these centres could be for financial services organizations. "It meant that they could reach large numbers of the public without the requirement for sales people on the street," he said.
As Mackay notes, about 80% of the questions that people have about financial services products, from mortgages to loans and insurance, can be answered over the phone, without the need for a face-to-face meeting. Operations such as Direct Line were able to demonstrate considerable cost savings and efficiencies over conventional financial services product distribution strategies. Scotland and the north-east of England did very well out of the first two decades of call centre operations in the UK. As Mackay explains, call centre operators tended to favour regions outside the expensive south-east of England, where building premises were far cheaper, and where there was a reasonably well-educated potential work force. The fact that the north-east of England and Scotland had seen a massive decline in their heavy industries meant that there was also competitive pressure for jobs, so wages were more competitive too, than down south.
