IVR services

Voice based access to any information source

Group 2000 delivers carrier grade, yet affordable IVR services that excel in connectivity. Based on our experience of over 20 years we know how to design, develop and support succesfull IVR services. A shortened time to market is achieved by using standard, existing, functionality extended with customer specific functions where necessary.

The Group 2000 SIMM/IVR platform has been the solid base of IVR applications for many years at various telecom operators.Now available as a carrier grade hosting platform it delivers guarantueed availability and support for high call volumes for IVR services in any market. Based on the Service Component Architecture, IVR services are built for reliability and scalability. A wealth of existing connection modules allow IVR services to be integrated in any environment and share information with databases, business information systems and telecom network equipment such as HLRs.

Connectivity

Connectivity modules allow interfacing to all kinds of equipement. IVR applications can be reached by (mobile) phones from any network, while allowing feedback via other channels like SMS and Email. Even the more unknown USSD channel, used in mobile networks, can be integrated with the SIMM/IVR platform to create applications such as USSD callback.

Traitionally IVR applications use the touchpad on the phone for selecting options. These DTMF tones provide reliable communication but lack flexibility for some application because they are limited to the choices 0-9,#,* For these applications services can be extended with ASR, Automatic Speech Recognition. By recognising natural speech users are allowed much more flexibitity when communicating with IVR services. Supporting large and speaker independant vocabularies, IVR services can autonomously handle intelligent conversations, reducing for example the load on a Call Center. For maximum flexibility on user feedback, Text To Speech is used. By using an almost perfectly natural, yet synthesised voice, there are no limits to the flexiblity of voice based feedback.

Video integration

The latest addition to the SIMM/IVR portfolio allows integration between IVR and Video services. Existing well-known and succesfull IVR applications, such as skilled base routing or prepaid IVR application at mobile operators, can be enriched with video access. By extending commonly used IVR application with a video channel a whole new user experience is created which can revive <uitgedoofde> applications or extend the lifetime of succcesfull voice only applications.

The SIMM/IVR platform provides graphical interfaces for management and configurability. In order to provide customers with enough flexibility for service configuration without overloading them with too much details, configuration interfaces are provided for those aspects of the service that are important to our customers. These configuration items are service specific and can even be tailored according to customer specific requirements.

The following list provides some examples of SIMM/IVR applications:

•   Voice channel in any multi-modal application  
•   Information numbers
•   Skilled based routing
•   Call Center IVRs
•   Self service applications