Press 1 for Sales...

Everyone is familiar with this kind of message when they call a company, most often when you ring the bank or a utility provider. In fact it's so common these days that I doubt most people even think about what's going on at the other end of the phone to play these messages to the caller.

The gubbins behind the message is known as an Interactive Voice Response, IVR, system which is effectively a computer connected to the phoneline not quite in the way you plug your phone into the line at home but it's sensible to think of it like that for sure. When you call the IVR's phone number the computer picks up the call and runs a script which tells it how to behave for calls coming into that line. Typically an IVR script will be created using a piece of software created by the IVR software manufacturer, some kind of 'Design Studio' which will let you join boxes together pretty much like a flowchart. In fact creating a flowchart for a service on paper or in a program like Open Office or Visio is the way I prefer to start creating a service myself as the flowchart typically translates into the IVR design software with very little change and looks prety much the same onscreen.

The first step in any flowchart is generally to play a message - 'Thank you for calling Fonovation Limited', etc. This is all very straightforward and sounds like a glorified answering machine. Which it is. So what's the advantage in having an IVR instead of an answering machine with a polite greeting on it?

For a start an IVR can make your business appear 'more' than it is, if you are a sole trader say, you could have a message like 'Press 1 for Sales, press 2 for Customer Services, etc, which would give the impression that your company was actually larger than it is, giving the caller a better impression of your organisation than thinking it was a one-man show regardless of how GOOD that show actually is. This gives you some opportunity to compete with companies that ARE larger by sounding more professional from the get-go.

More than this, though, an IVR can make you available when you'd not normally be by intelligently redirecting calls using Personal Hunt Groups, first caling your landline, then your mobile then maybe a VOIP line and then finally taking a message from the caller and emailing it to you in the event of no answer from any phone in your Group. The simple act of emailing you a recorded message from the caller itself means that you can collect and listen to the message from anywhere and and DEVICE that can receive email and play audio. Such as you mobile phone.

IVR's can also perform more automated tasks such as prompting the caller to enter a PIN or account number and then reading data from a CRM database or some customer details and allowing the caller to interact with the system to manage their details. Think of your mobile phone's voicemail settings system, this is a classic IVR application.

Don't forget the phone number you dial to reach the IVR system, either. You don't have to run your IVR application on a normal landline number, far from it. Most of the IVR's you will have encountered will be on 0845/0870/0844 type 'non-geographic' numbers or perhaps competition lines running on premium-rate numbers. 0800 and 0845 numbers in particular are popular for business as they are free or local-rate (respectively) for the caller.

The cost of an IVR system can be prohibitively expensive for many organisations with a 60-line (30 lines plus 30 backup in case of a failure) system costing up to £12,000 for the software alone never mind the server hardware, line cards and the rental of a pair of ISDN-30's from BT or someone else. This is where Hosted IVR fills a gap by allowing you to rent your phone number and IVR application hosting in much the same way as you'd rent your internet connection from your ISP.

Even so, hosted IVR systems can be quite expensive too with many providers requiring a minimum commitment of up to £500 each month which is a lot of outlay for a glorified answering machine. Fortunately we at Fonovation Limited think there's a less painful/expensive route to providing hosted IVR and phone numbers so if you've found this article useful (even educational!) consider dropping by www.fonovation.com to see how you think we compare to the other providers out there.