On June 16, Bill Hughes (News - Alert), lead IVR designer for Callfire, a provider of voice broadcast technology, hosted a webinar on TMCnet. TMC (News - Alert) is the world’s largest communications and technology community.
The webinar kicked off with an introduction to CallFire. However, several attendees got a preview of what CallFire can offer customers, as these participants previously had opted in to receive text message reminders 10 minutes prior to the start of the webinar. Hughes then went on to show those who attended the webinar how CallFire’s enterprise clients can work with a entire Professional Services Team at CallFire, made up of a developer, engineer, and account manager at the very minimum.
He defined and explained in detail what an IVR is, and what it can do, according to a recent blog posting. IVR applications typically incorporate the ability to play pre-recorded sound files, read text-to-speech entries, ask questions and receive responses, send responses to a server and receive information back, record audio data, and transfer and route calls.
So, if a business realizes IVRs are crucial to operations, why should they implement a hosted IVR rather than an on-premise system? Bill answered this important question by speaking about the economies of scale associated with Hosted (or Cloud) IVR, and focused on a feature that only CallFire offers—that all data can remain secure on the company’s own servers. The only element that stays in the cloud is the way the data is gathered.
Security remains a huge obstacle in terms of cloud deployments. During the webinar, CallFire completed a poll of attendees, and security remained high on their lists of concerns. Costs associated with these deployments were at the top of participants’ lists, as well as a hosted solution. Through utilizing a hosted IVR, no additional hardware or special equipment is needed, and continuous maintenance is handled by the provider. In certain cases where enterprises already have data uploaded to the cloud, the vendor will work with off-site archive, so no additional capital needs to be used to enable backup products, software, or hardware.
CallFire has served many large-scale clients and the webinar highlighted four case studies.
The blog stated that the first occurred in the political arena, and CallFire’s Hosted IVR has served various national, state, and local campaigns assisting with sending out automated surveys, get-out-the-vote reminders and meet-the-candidate calls.
The next case study was about a huge investment company. The firm needed to receive votes from its shareholders, but every shareholder was different and had to vote on specific issues or directors for funds that they were invested in. CallFire handles this through building an IVR from that ground up that had the capability to handle voting needs, based on a shareholder’s voter reference number. This ensured that sensitive information remained secure, while letting shareholders use a simple way to cast votes on their funds.
The third example is Ipsos Loyalty, a company which CallFire worked in conjunction with in order to process customer satisfaction surveys seven million times. Because CallFire’s IVR is highly sophisticated and was able to make the order of questions completely random, the statistics were fully validated. However, the surveys only asked questions about departments that the survey-taker had actually been to when they had visited the store. Before Ipsos began working with CallFire, the company’s survey used over 7,000 lines of code in the back-end. When CallFire’s work was completed, it was down to 1,000 lines of code, dramatically increasing the script’s efficiency.
Finally, Hughes highlighted United Road Service, an auto delivery service company for Honda (News - Alert). Similar to other enterprise clients, United needed some type of verbal confirmation for both insurance and legal purposes. The Cloud IVR helped in this situation by allowing United Road Service drivers to call into the IVR, enter their driver code, and then confirm via a verbal statement that the delivery had been made and the truck was returned to drivable position. CallFire allowed for every recording to be given to United Road Service directly through its API. Since United implemented this call-in system, accidents rates have decreased by over 75 percent, and Honda recognized the United Road Service IVR a Best Practice.
To view the webinar in its entirety, just click play on the video below.
IVR Solutions at the Enterprise Level
View more presentations from callfire
Jamie Epstein is a TMCnet Web Editor. Previously she interned at News 12 Long Island as a reporter's assistant. After working as an administrative assistant for a year, she joined TMC as a Web editor for TMCnet. Jamie grew up on the North Shore of Long Island and holds a bachelor's degree in mass communication with a concentration in broadcasting from Five Towns College. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by Rich Steeves