Err, no. But tell me, why is the IVR industry so behind? It seems as if the majority out there still believes it is normal for a premise IVR system to be

• difficult to install
• costly to use
• hard to maintain

The only thing you can do with it that works is static touch tone menus to route calls, and changes as simple as prompt replacement or menu item deactivation require

• expensive professional services
• downtime of the entire system
• days or even weeks of implementation time

Now with all what Voxeo is about, if YOU have followed what we have been doing since day 1, then YOU will know that all of the above is just not true and completely outdated. Go to www.voxeo.com/free, download our free SIP and IVR platform and service creation, administration and reporting environment, install it and build your first callable voice portal in less than 1 hour.
All of the above might have been the case a decade ago and earlier, in the 90s, but hellooo!? It’s 2009, VoiceXML is out there for 10 years, VoIP technologies such as SIP are becoming a de facto standard for voice communication and software vendors write platform-agnostic tools for all standards around voice automation such as VoiceXML, SRGS+SISR, SSML, CCXML and more.

Now I don’t want to write a marketing blog post on how simple things are with Voxeo products. What I want to write about is one particular topic that STILL comes up from potential customers:

“Can you export the applications to static VXML?”

But at the same time, they want a system that

• offers an easy-to-use graphical development environment
• supports team collaboration and user management
• runs self-service applications on multiple channels including voice, text and Web
• supports natural language dialogs
• provides dynamic call flows with individual and/or group-level personalization
• supports multi-lingualism
• offers automatic self-documentation of call flows and prompt lists
• enables easy reusability, modularization and shared libraries
• comes with inbuilt debugging and load, functionality, and regression testing tools
• allows easy management of port allocation and session partitioning
• offers tools for easy prompt management
• can be managed and monitored through SNMP and/or email notifications
• provides sophisticated reporting and analytics of system performance, caller behavior, and business metrics

???

And then they want to export the entire system to a static presentation markup file?

Think about it this way. If you were not to build a system to manage voice portals, but Web portals instead, of the complexity and size of an amazon.com, cnn.com, or ebay.com – with the multitude of individual pages (= dialog steps), text (= prompts), structure (= call flow), and content in general: would you ever ask a provider of such a content/application management system to add a feature to export everything to a static HTML file?

—–

Change takes time, effort, and can be painful. And with dinosaurs of the IVR industry out there that have managed to sell overly complex, costly, and difficult (let alone proprietary) systems in the past and still sometimes do so today, I somehow understand that people who need to buy a new IVR environment but don’t know as much about the underlying technology as they know about the much more predominant sister technologies of the ubiquitous visual WWW tend to look at it in a way that is nowadays simply outdated. In fact, the technologies underneath modern IVR are exactly the same as those of the Web. It is all based on XML over HTTP to deliver content via IP.

PLEASE, dear IVR industry, do a better job of explaining the world how easy it is in 2009 to build and run automated communication services, involving voice, text, Web, and more. It’s a joint effort! Danke schön.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 9:31 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.