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By Susan J. Campbell

TMCnet Contributing Editor

 

 

There are many reasons why VoiceXML should voice-enable your Web site. First, the technology offers significant cost benefits for organizations. By allowing for the creation, modification and personalization of its applications, VoiceXML can provide substantial cost savings when compared to proprietary and traditional IVR systems. Its ease of application development also enables companies to leverage in-house resources as opposed to depending upon specialized developers.

 

A VoiceXML-handled call can take the cost of the call from more than $5 down to close to zero. Additional cost savings can also be realized from improved customer loyalty, lower operating costs, increased system performance, higher automation rates, reduced call wait times and caller abandons, increased first-call resolution rates and improved agent productivity.

 

VoiceXML also offers the organization tremendous flexibility. Organizations have traditionally deployed on-premise IVR systems. Hosted systems have accounted for less than 10 percent of the market in the past several years. This trend toward on-premise deployment was a result of companies preferring to maintain control over applications that were tightly integrated with proprietary IVR systems.

 

As the application is separated from the speech and telephony resources, VoiceXML resides on any Web server and the speech resources and telephony resources reside on a VoiceXML Gateway (News - Alert) Server. This server is then linked to the Web server via an IP network. As such, the Web server hosting the VoiceXML applications and the VoiceXML Gateway Server can either be located together or thousands of miles apart and communicating via the Internet.

 

VoiceXML also enables the enterprise the ability to re-use Internet infrastructure so that separate silos of support, equipment and maintenance can be eliminated. The organization can build telephone services while reusing existing Web infrastructure, making it possible to share and use resources much more efficiently. Because VoiceXML applications reside on Web servers and can share the same back-end links to legacy systems and databases that support Web applications, management of these applications is more proficient.  

 

Finally, VoiceXML enables the enterprise to select best-of-breed applications, platforms and speech engines as it allows for separation at each layer. Organizations are not ‘locked’ into all three due to proprietary systems and can thus select the applications, platforms and speech engines that best suit their needs.

 

With the enterprise-wide benefits that it can provide, VoiceXML is rapidly gaining adoption across multiple industries as more and more organizations are realizing the benefits that the solution can provide and the costs of proprietary systems. The technology continues to experience innovation as well, making it an even more compelling solution for any organization seeking cost control, flexibility, enhanced efficiencies and best-of-breed solutions.

 

 

Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMC (News - Alert) and has also written for eastbiz.com. To see more of her articles, please visit Susan J. Campbell’s columnist page.

 

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