When to Deploy an IVR System Onsite
June 03, 2010
By Stefania Viscusi, Assignment Desk Editor
IVR Hosting and "cloud telephony" have become two popular areas of focus over the last several years as businesses discover the benefits software-as-a-service "SaaS (News - Alert)" provides for managing customer relations with business processes.
By using IVR hosting, businesses can rid themselves of the headaches involved in managing Telco relationships and setting up telephony servers.
But for some organizations, it does still make sense to deploy an onsite IVR system.
According to officials with Plum Voice, "The two most prominent business issues that lead a company to purchase an IVR system over hosting services are stringent security policies and the need to leverage an internal enterprise phone system to transfer calls within a PBX (News - Alert)."
For those companies that adhere to HIPAA security practices and/or ISO standards, company officials said, the onsite system which lives behind their firewall may be preferable.
"This allows the organization to transfer data from the IVR to a database on their internal network - as opposed to sending data from a hosted IVR facility to the company's data center."
For those companies with very high call volumes, an onsite deployment can also bring cost savings and other benefits.
If calls are constantly being transferred from an IVR to agents, it is beneficial for companies to make use of their internal phone networks to transfer calls, rather than piling on the fees incurred when calls are transferred from the IVR hosting center to a call center in another geographic location.
Plum provides both hosted IVR services and onsite systems so companies may automate their most frequent calls using a deployment model that best suits their needs and policies.
The company's onsite IVR systems are network-based appliances that support VoiceXML, speech recognition, and text-to-speech. The systems start as small as 24 ports and can scale into thousands of ports. Likewise, Plum's hosted IVR infrastructure can handle extreme call volumes and can scale seamlessly with companies' call volume needs.
For more, check out the IVR System channel on TMCnet.
Stefania Viscusi is an assignment editor for TMCnet, covering voice and Voice over IP technologies. She also oversees production of TMCnet's e-Newsletters in the areas of Internet telephony and speech technology. To read more of Stefania's articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by Stefania Viscusi