IVR System Year in Review: Interact Focuses on the Customer
December 05, 2011
By Juliana Kenny, TMCnet Managing Editor
From talking to various leading developers and participants in the interactive voice response (IVR) market, you would think the cloud is about to absorb us all. And, perhaps it is. And if it is, the folks over at Interact, Inc. will certainly be ready.
Recently, I caught up with the company to find out how it views its performance during 2011, and what it is looking forward to in 2012. Ed McKee, director of marketing for Interact, shed some light on the advancements the company made over the past 12 months.
As a provider of voice application software, speech recognition services, and flexible IVR systems, Interact has a unique vantage point on the progression of the IVR market. “Interact was able the leverage the knowledge of virtualization it gained in 2011 and move headfirst into cloud communications. With successful deployments into Amazon, Softlayer, and Rackspace (News - Alert) we are well positioned to help our customers move into true cloud enabled environment,” noted McKee.
So it only follows that a provider of technology that helps companies communicate more smoothly with their customers has a great customer relationship strategy too, right? Right. McKee told us that Interact is focused on its customer base now more than ever and plans to extend that focused effort into 2012. He said that Interact’s “new Service Creation Tool will allow customers to greatly improve their time to market. Improved web hooks, tighter ASR and TTS integration, with the addition of AMD (News - Alert) (Answering Machine Detection) will make hosting applications even easier. Not moving too far away from our core our SPOT Media Platform will still support VXML and CCXML standards.”
The delicate balancing act small businesses must perform in today’s economy, juggling expenses while maintaining those vital customer relationships, is what Interact understands best. Customers tend to have very customized needs these days and require an IVR system provider than can be flexible and scalable with varying operational basics. McKee stated, “We are striving to address our customers at whatever stage they may be in. Providing our customers a path from our cloud to their cloud is one way we are addressing this.”
Interact expects to play an important role in the changes of the market during 2012, and, frankly, the company expects to see IVR systems in the cloud becoming the norm, “not the exception,” according to McKee.
Juliana Kenny graduated from the University of Connecticut with a double degree in English and French. After managing a small company for two years, she joined TMC (News - Alert) as a Web Editor for TMCnet. Juliana currently focuses on the call center and CRM industries, but she also writes about cloud telephony and network gear including softswitches.
Edited by Carrie Schmelkin