A Hosted IVR Solution
>>>>> BUSINESS PROBLEM: As your enterprise’s sales continue to slow down in a recessionary economy, you’re looking to streamline your call center to cut costs. An IVR would help, but an on-premises deployment requires an up-front capital investment that you cannot manage.
>>>>> TECHNOLOGY SOLUTION: A Hosted IVR Solution
With hosted solutions, the enterprise customer does not have to worry about overhead or risk. The service provider is also responsible for maintaining, tuning, and upgrading the solutions, eliminating the need for an extensive in-house IT department. Return on investment is typically more rapid with these types of deployments, as well.
Product: Angel.com’s Inbound IVR
Delivery Method: A hosted solution.
Pricing: Angel.com offers a pay-as-you-go pricing strategy, based on per-minute usage. Customers pay for only the minutes they actually use. Basic deployments start at $39.95, with enterprise plans starting at $500.
Functionality: Angel.com’s solution is scalable to businesses of all sizes. It offers a Web-based toolkit, Site Builder, that facilitates voice menu design via an Internet connection. It allows full integration with most standard databases or customer relationship management tools.
Business Benefits: This solution can help reduce costs by eliminating the need for human agents. As a fully hosted solution, no investment in hardware, software, or human resources is required, potentially delivering immediate returns for a variety of business needs.
Contact: Angel.com at 1-888-692-6435; www.angel.com.
Product: Pronexus’ VBVoice
Delivery Method: Hosted software.
Pricing: A VBVoice developer seat is $1,200 and allows users to develop multiple IVRs, dialers, and any other telephony applications of any size. VBVoice runtimes start at $190 and can be lower for larger VBVoice applications. A developer’s 21-day evaluation version is available for free. Also offered are “starter kit” packages.
Functionality: VBVoice allows enterprises to develop their own IVR solutions for hosting. Optional controls are available for including speech recognition, text-to-speech, conferencing, multiple languages, and other advanced features.
Business Benefits: Pronexus can build scalable IVRs from the ground up. Pronexus also provides consulting services at various stages of development.
Product: Verizon Business Hosted IVR Speech Services
Delivery Method: A hosted solution.
Pricing: Provided on a usage-based, pay-as-you-go pricing model, including per-minute and per-transaction elements. Customer rates vary significantly, based on factors such as application complexity and call duration. Typical Speech Services transactions cost between 8 cents and 15 cents per call, although prices for some applications fall outside of this range.
Functionality: This solution is scalable to enterprises of any size. It offers traditional development models, where Verizon develops the IVR and maintains the system, and an open-hosted model where users can create their own IVRs using any VoiceXML-supporting tool.
Business Benefits: This solution comes with low up-front start-up costs, allowing enterprises to avoid huge capital expenditures. It comes with flexible delivery models. Verizon also offers expertise in consulting.