Four Steps to IVR Application Excellence

2015 Annual
Speech Reference
Guide
Sponsored Content
TECHNOLOGY
Four Steps to IVR
Application Excellence
Step 1: Simplify IVR Application
Creation and Migration
Welcome to Convergys’ white paper
series, Four Steps to IVR Application
Excellence, designed to help you
streamline your internal application
development process while preserving
the effortless experience your customers
expect. We will begin this series with
design and development best practices,
then explore the end-user experience,
followed by a look at optimization and
tuning. We’ll end the series with tips on
how to use reporting and analytics to
ensure ongoing success.
Accelerating Application Creation
Most voice user interface (VUI)
applications are documented using Visio,
MS Word, or a combination of the two.
And, while documenting an IVR call
flow may appear simple, it is often quite
complex. A labyrinth of menu paths,
alternate prompting, and varying data
conditions ultimately produces a large
design document that is challenging
to manage—not only during the initial
implementation, but also throughout
post-production updates and changes.
Here’s a common scenario: It’s time for
the next big quarterly release of your VUI
application. Your business line is adding
multiple new menus and conditions to
your existing handling to take callers to
these new menus. You’re dreading the
updates because once you finish the
high-level call flow, you must provide
detailed design specifications to the
developers. Then, once the detailed
specifications are approved, you have to
find your old prompt list from last quarter
and manually add the new prompts and
edit old ones for the new release. That’s
a lot of copying and pasting! The good
news is there is a better way.
www.speechtechmag.com
Innovative design tools allow you to
specify the design once, then click one
button to generate a high level call flow,
another button to generate the detailed
design document, and a third one to
create the prompt recording list. Today’s
advanced tools also smartly enable the
generation of test cases, and, in some
cases, the generation of code for the user
interface portions of the application, saving
hundreds of hours on typical projects.
documentation. Because the code is
not being written from scratch again,
development and testing time can be
significantly reduced, compared to a
full life-cycle development effort. The
generated code can be edited as needed,
and can often be greatly improved
upon by moving appropriate logic that
was originally written in the legacy
application into standard languages such
as Java or JavaScript.
Dealing with End-of-Life Migrations
Summary
Let’s look at another common situation
that strikes fear in the heart of IT and
business application owners alike:
Your company has a large IVR selfservice application that is crucial to your
contact center and your customers.
It takes 99% of all the traffic coming
into your 800 numbers and provides a
solid containment rate that would be
extremely expensive if disrupted.
Using the right tools for new application
builds, ongoing maintenance or
legacy application migration takes the
pain out of design maintenance and
system migration.
You helped build this application to
what it is today and remember when it
first launched over a decade ago. So,
when you hear “End of Life”, you think,
“Nobody really understands how big
this application is.” You realize your
documentation is in Visio format, and it
hasn’t been updated in five years. How
can someone rebuild your application
if the only documentation that matches
your existing code is your existing code?
To solve this dilemma, you need a robust
translator tool that can read your existing
application, library, translator table, and
business hours source code and convert
them, form-by-form, into code that is
compatible with the new platform. By
starting with the currently-in-production
legacy code, you can be assured all your
latest application logic is included and
eliminate the need to rely on out-of-date
To learn more about Convergys’
application design and translation tools,
visit www.convergys.com/IVR and make
plans to attend our informative webinar
on February 18, 2015.
Also, stay tuned for Step 2: Design Your
IVR Around the Customer Journey in the
Summer 2015 issue of this magazine.
Why Convergys:
Convergys is the only contact center
solution provider with more than 30 years
of hands-on customer care success. We
don’t just sell solutions, we use them
ourselves, along with our best practices
and analytics. And we take that knowledge
and experience and use it to constantly
improve our solutions. Because we gain
a great deal of insight from handling more
than 5 billion customer interactions every
year, we are experts in not just contact
center technology, but in what it takes to
help you deploy and use that technology
to meet your unique business goals.
Speech Technology 2015 Reference Guide
RG19