Conversational, Net2Phone Get Together to Augment the Machine Answering System

Admittedly, few people like to talk to a machine when calling a company. The problem is that having machines answer phones—commonly seen in answering services or virtual receptionist tools—is a lot less expensive than having a person do the job, and sometimes, can be even more effective. Recently, virtual receptionist provider Conversational announced it was getting together with Net2Phone to help drive new developments in answering systems.

Net2Phone is well-known in the market as a provider of voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) service, which will serve as a great point to help Conversational augment its virtual receptionist services. With Net2Phone involved, Conversational's connections between the user and the virtual receptionist can be improved, and make for a better experience overall. Additionally, Net2Phone can provide some extra help in terms of infrastructure, which should help yield some new redundancy capabilities to take some strain off the system as well.

With Net2Phone in place, reports note, Conversational's systems can handle as many as 450,000 calls simultaneously, which significantly improves the overall experience for callers. Better yet, there are even new functions available including call routing options to help the callers get to where they're most likely to find help. Just to top it off, Conversational can even take advantage of secure data center facilities currently located in eight different countries, so that's another point in its favor. The move overall should only take a couple of weeks, reports note, and that could be a big help for Conversational.

Conversational's CEO, Tanya Lamont, commented “We are consistently reviewed as a 5-star company while using our current phone system, so we are very excited to see how our current and new clients respond to even better call quality, routing ability, and reduced call delays. This is a switch we've been considering for a while, one that has required a lot of research, strategic decision-making, and planning. It's just one more way we're working to improve the level of service we provide to our clients and their callers."

Granted, interactive voice response (IVR) and virtual receptionist tools haven't always gotten the best shake from regular users, who don't much enjoy being pushed off onto a machine, but those machines really do help matters. By pressing those series of ones and fives and such to reach a particular department, callers are improving the odds that they'll reach the help that's most needed at the time, instead of having to get transferred from one department to the next. That's a much worse customer experience, and though virtual receptionists don't always work how we'd prefer, developments like this will help make things better.

In the end, it's all about continuous improvement, and virtual receptionists are definitely improving. Efforts like those between Conversational and Net2Phone are making sure that's the ca


Edited by Maurice Nagle