IVR Systems Need Reliable Service Level Agreements Now More than Ever

By Juliana Kenny, TMCnet Web Editor

Now, more than ever, companies must recognize the importance of establishing service level agreements with their IVR providers for a number of reasons. Most importantly, businesses often build critical processes around IVR Systems and services. They require them to effectively communicate critical information to their customers, partners and employees. To ensure the fluid and error-free uptime of these systems, a service level agreement must be in place.

IVR solutions should be able to answer calls 24/7 without outages. Service level agreements between company and IVR system provider ensure these effective uptimes. Victor Bartolome, director of support operations for Plum Voice remarked, “Plum offers hardened systems that are capable of running continuously for many years, handling millions of calls without error. Plum also works with its customers to architect IVR system setups that are fully redundant but in the event of system malfunction, system monitoring and failure notification occurs in real-time to ensure fast response and continuous uptime.”

While hardware failures are just facts of life, Plum’s back-up capacity steps in with services such as next-day shipment and full operational replacement. Plum’s responsive engineering support. Check out some aspects of Plum’s service level agreement:

--Unlimited remote system monitoring provided 24/7

--Free software updates

--24/7 phone support to connect to a live engineer

--Full operational replacement of hardware provided in 24 hours

--99 percent uptime guarantee for hosted IVR service

--Access to tutorials and training information

IVR systems must be able to handle critical communications processes for businesses that provide alerts, customer information, and access to a company’s database over the phone. Often, IVR systems reside and function at the core of a business’ ability to be efficient and productive. Plum Voice’s support team is available to resolve any issue 24/7 without requiring a 3rd party software vendor. Equipped with remote maintenance boards, Plum’s team can remotely manage, update, and rebuild system components.

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 Juliana Kenny

(source: http://www.tmcnet.com/channels/ivr-system/articles/105109-ivr-systems-need-reliable-service-level-agreements-now.htm)