As customer interaction expectations increase, so do customers’ frustration with outdated interactive voice response (IVR) systems. To fight off these, as Voxeo (News - Alert) calls them, "Talking Dead" IVR systems, the provider of Unlocked Communications is launching a campaign today to show how fast, easy and affordable it can be to move from outdated IVR systems to a new, flexible solution that meets the high expectation of customers.

Just like other IVR providers, Voxeo has branded “Zombie IVR” systems that frustrate customers . They greet customers with unhelpful, one-size-fits-all menu options, and insist their options have recently changed when in reality they have not been updated in years. These outdated IVRs can’t understand customer needs and go and on like the "talking dead.” The caller is then likely to take his or her business elsewhere.

"Legacy and end-of-life systems put companies at a significant competitive disadvantage. Additionally, the opportunity costs of an inflexible system that makes it time-consuming, expensive or impossible to add features that drive customer loyalty and revenue, like multi-channel self-service, voice biometrics, location-based services and personalization, must be considered,” said Ashif Dhanani, vice president of marketing for Voxeo.

Even with these obvious weaknesses, companies aren’t confident about upgrading Zombie IVR systems, and the potential cost and downtime are keeping them from migrating their IVR system. Voxeo's Zombie IVR campaign highlights the true cost of migrating to a quality system and the importance of building that new system on open standards that ensure flexibility for the future.

Dhanani said, "We have built our company on the philosophy of being 100 percent standards-compliant and unlocked at every layer, so our clients avoid the pitfalls of being locked into a platform and applications that keep them, their staff and their budget slaves to the technology."

Voxeo's VoiceObjects (News - Alert) has saved customers up to 80 percent in maintenance and lifecycle management costs. To make the migration process efficient, Voxeo has tools that ease conversion from platforms like Edify, Intervoice and Nortel (News - Alert), which have been demonstrated to automate the conversion of up to 95 percent of old code to Voxeo VoiceObjects.

"But just because an IVR system has an absence of critical errors doesn't mean a company should be lulled into complacency," said Dhanani. "There is incredible opportunity cost when end-of-life systems can't cohesively communicate with customers through multiple channels such as text, mobile web and social media.”

Voxeo's architecture is based on open standards such as VoiceXML (News - Alert) 2.0 and 2.1, CCXML, SIP, MRCP and SSML. The company offers deployment flexibility, delivering hosted cloud and on-premise options with the ability to easily move from one to the other or leverage a hybrid combination of the models.

Dhanani said, “Your customers are there... it's up to you whether your company chooses to keep up."

To find out more about Voxeo and its presentation at ITEXPO West 2012, visit the company at ITEXPO. To be held Oct. 2-5 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, TX, ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. Voxeo is speaking during “The SIRI Effect,” which will discuss the evolution of voice biometrics, why businesses should consider it, and how to successfully deploy a voice biometrics solution.

 For more information on ITEXPO click here.