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IVR Library

The world of interactive voice comes with all sorts of special terminology and acronyms that may be intimidating to the uninitiated.

Tuesday June 20, 2017

What is IVR?

IVR stands for Interactive Voice Response. IVR is a technology that automates telephone calls, both inbound and outbound. Organizations are increasingly turning to IVR to reduce the costs associated with providing service, sales, collections, patient support, student engagement and support to and from their company.

In the past, IVR solutions used pre-recorded voice prompts and menus to present information and options to callers, and touch-tone telephone keypad entry to gather responses. Now IVR solutions also enable input and responses via spoken words with voice recognition.

Vocantas offers world class voice recognition, while tailoring IVR solutions to your specific business requirements. Our solutions are currently deployed in leading edge hospitals, colleges, utilities and many more organizations that leverage personalized call experiences while reducing overall costs associated with patient, student and customer engagement.

IVR solutions enable users to retrieve information including account balances, outage information, access to resources, medical information and much more from any telephone. Additionally, IVR solutions are increasingly used to place outbound calls to deliver or gather information for scheduling appointments, providing medication dosing information, past due bills, and other time critical events and activities.

IVR Platforms

IVR platforms are the hardware and software   on which IVR solutions run, including the server and operating system.

IVR platforms at a minimum provide the ability to play and record prompts and   gather touch-tone input. IVR platforms may also offer the ability to recognize   spoken input from callers (voice recognition), translate text into spoken output   for callers (text-to-speech), and transfer IVR calls to any telephone or call   center agent.

IVR Applications

IVR applications are programs that control and respond to calls on the IVR platform. IVR applications can either be developed by an enterprise, by an IVR development shop, or by companies that offer canned IVR applications.

IVR applications direct the IVR platform to prompt callers, gather input, and transfer callers to other phones. IVR applications also call on existing back-end database and application servers to retrieve records and information required during the course of a call.

The Vocantas IVR Platform allows customers to customize every response within the call to a related action. The platform is tailored to each custom solution to solve the customers unique business requirements.

Back-End Servers

Back-end servers are existing enterprise servers on which the required customer or corporate data can be found.

Back-end servers can include databases, mainframes, Java or other application servers, and third party information services and solutions.

Vocantas IVR solutions are agnostic to any existing back-end server. Our IVR system can be added to virtually any existing infrastructure.

Speech Recognition

Speech recognition is the ability of a machine or program to identify words and phrases in spoken language and convert them to a machine-readable format.

IVR Experts

  1. IVR Experts include employees and consultants who know IVR technology and challenges well. 
  2. Ideally, IVR teams should include one or more members who have experience with IVR integration, configuration, reliability and redundancy, application development, and IVR solution deployment management.
  3. Vocantas has a dedicated team of IVR experts with decades of IVR experience. Our team works with each customer to personalize call scripts and call flows to provide exceptional response rates to your IVR system.

Telephony

The technology associated with the electronic transmission of voice, fax, or other information between distant parties using systems historically associated with the telephone. With the arrival of computers and the transmittal of digital information over telephone systems and the use of radio to transmit telephone signals, the distinction between telephony and telecommunication has become difficult to make.

Telephony Infrastructure

Telephony infrastructure includes telephone lines, and existing call switching equipment which can be PBX based or VOIP based.

Telephone lines for IVR can be standard analog lines, digital T1, or digital ISDN lines. These lines are connected on one side to the IVR platform and, on the other, to call switching equipment including Telco switches, Voice over IP gateways, or to corporate PBX’s.

IVR Objectives

Clear IVR objectives are key to successful IVR application design and delivery. These objectives identify the various ways callers will interface with an IVR application to achieve their goals. From these objectives the Vocantas team will build a set of specifications for your custom IVR solution.

Vocantas works closely with clients to understand their business goals, solution requirements and customer expectations for IVR applications. Through this process, Vocantas can quickly define required application functionality and accelerate the speed of subsequent call flow design, application development and IVR application deployment.

Emergency Broadcast System

An IVR system that can connect with personnel through direct telephone interaction to quickly notify everyone of emergency measures that have been put in place or of an emergency situation.              

Lone Worker

An employee who works alone for the majority of their work day. Generally, the majority of security personnel are considered Lone Workers.

Mass Notification

The ability to connect with thousands of people in just a few minutes with outbound IVR.

Your IVR System

Vocantas is eager to help you improve an existing IVR solution or build a new solution based on our years of experience. Contact us today for a free demonstration of voice solutions that LISTEN.

Toll free: +1 (877) 271-8853

Email: info@vocantas.com

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