Cisco Unified IP Interactive Voice Response

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< Cisco® Unified IP Interactive Voice Response (IP IVR)-an integral component of the Cisco Unified Communications system-provides an open, extensible, and feature-rich foundation for the creation and delivery of IVR applications.

The Cisco Unified Communications system of voice and IP communications products and applications enables organizations to communicate more effectively-helping them to streamline business processes, reach the right resource the first time, and impact the top and bottom line. The Cisco Unified Communications portfolio is a key part of the Cisco Business Communications Solution-an integrated solution for organizations of all sizes which also includes network infrastructure, security, and network management products, wireless connectivity, and a lifecycle services approach, along with flexible deployment and outsourced management options, end-user and partner financing packages, and third-party communications applications.
Cisco Systems® customer contact solutions enable you to move into the next phase of customer contact-beyond today's contact center to a Customer Interaction Network. A Customer Interaction Network is a distributed, IP-based infrastructure that encompasses a continuously evolving suite of multichannel services and customer relationship management (CRM) applications. These services and applications enhance your responsiveness and streamline customer exchanges to help your organization deliver superior customer service. A Customer Interaction Network extends customer service capabilities across the entire organization, giving your business a more integrated and collaborative approach to customer satisfaction.
OVERVIEW

Cisco Unified IP IVR is designed to enhance the efficiency of your organization by simplifying business integration, increasing flexibility, and providing efficiency gains in network hosting. These features reduce business costs and can dramatically improve customer satisfaction. Tightly integrated with Cisco Unified CallManager software, Cisco Unified IP IVR offers ease of installation, configuration, and application hosting because it is constructed to exploit the power of IP-based communications.
Cisco Unified IP IVR is designed to facilitate concurrent multimedia communication processing. The Cisco Unified IP IVR architecture is open and extensible to allow you to incorporate custom-developed Java classes, enabling developers to extend Cisco Unified IP IVR to meet your special business needs.
FEATURES AND BENEFITS

Cisco Unified IP IVR has several features to increase customer satisfaction:
• Facilitate self-service options, such as access to checking account information or user-directed call routing, by processing user commands through touchtone input or speech recognition technologies

• Enable customers to retrieve the information they require through voice commands without ever speaking with an agent, or to quickly navigate to the correct department or agent that can help them

• Provide multilingual support for Cisco Unified IP IVR Server prompts, for automated speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) capabilities

• Deliver notification to users through e-mail, fax, pager, and short message service (SMS) (some of these services require the use of a service provider or fax server)

• Provide more comprehensive and effective customer service by efficiently handling call traffic with self-service or fast transfer to the correct agent the first time

Cisco Unified IP IVR offers many ways to reduce operating and application development costs:
• Allow simple transactional requests to be offloaded from agents and handled by Cisco Unified IP IVR

• Enable rapid development and deployment of IVR applications with a Web-based service creation and scripting environment

• Allow HTTP requests to trigger application execution

• Support ASR through integration with Nuance ASR software

• Support TTS through integration with Nuance Vocalizer software

• Enable easy test and debug of applications using built-in debugging tools

• Provide standard real-time and historical reports to efficiently manage contact center resources

• Support development of customized reports using a third-party reporting package to meet additional reporting requirements in the contact center

• Significantly reduce costly equipment used for integration of an existing IVR or private branch exchange (PBX)

Cisco Unified IP IVR can help reduce acquisition, installation, and maintenance costs:
• Quick and easy installation from a single CD

• Administration done from anywhere on your corporate WAN with a completely Web-based administration interface

• Access to customer information provided through support for Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) and access to SQL Server, Oracle, IBM DB2, and Sybase databases

• Enhanced scalability for ease of expansion as your contact center operation grows

Finally, Cisco Unified IP IVR can help optimize corporate and contact center resources:
• Perform "prompt-and-collect" functions to obtain user data, such as passwords or account identification, to pass to contact center agents

• Extract and parse Web content and present this data to customers through a telephony interface, facilitating reuse and delivery of Web-maintained information to callers through a voice portal

• Support Voice Extensible Markup Language (VXML), allowing you to create voice portals and voice-enabling Web sites that use HTTP, XML, and Web or application servers

• Integrate with CiscoWorks network management software

CISCO UNIFIED IP IVR COMPONENTS

Cisco Unified IP IVR has five primary components:
• IP IVR Editor-a Windows GUI-based application-development environment in which users create applications and flows using a drag-and-drop interface

• IP IVR Engine-the run-time environment that executes Cisco Unified IP IVR flows

• Step libraries-libraries of JavaBeans that provide the programming constructs, called steps, for the Cisco Unified IP IVR flows

• Flow repository-a storage location for all flows and configuration data using Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)

• Reporting application-a tool that provides access to real-time and historical reporting statistics

The Cisco Unified IP IVR feature set processes voice-over-IP (VoIP) streams routed to it by Cisco Unified CallManager and thus requires no digital-signal-processor (DSP) cards in Cisco Unified IP IVR itself. Therefore, to connect Cisco Unified IP IVR, Cisco Unified CallManager, and the public switched telephone network (PSTN) only one time-division multiplexing (TDM) interface is required: the VoIP gateway interface to the PSTN. IP-originated calls require no TDM infrastructure; therefore, Internet- and intranet-generated VoIP calls can terminate directly on Cisco Unified IP IVR.
Administration of Cisco Unified IP IVR is completely Web based; thus administrators can start, stop, and update the IP IVR Engine from a standard Web browser. This GUI manages the details of interfacing Cisco Unified IP IVR with Cisco Unified CallManager and access to the other required network resources.
The IP IVR Engine also supports a powerful debug mode that allows the designer to create breakpoints and to directly upload and execute the flow for testing purposes. When testing is complete, the designer uploads the completed application to the directory, from where it may be deployed to production Cisco Unified IP IVR servers on the network.
CISCO UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS SERVICES AND SUPPORT

Using the Cisco Lifecycle Services approach, Cisco Systems and its partners offer a broad portfolio of end-to-end services to support the Cisco Unified Communications system. These services are based on proven methodologies for deploying, operating, and optimizing IP communications solutions. Upfront planning and design services, for example, can help you meet aggressive deployment schedules and minimize network disruption during implementation. Operate services reduce the risk of communications downtime with expert technical support. Optimize services enhance solution performance for operational excellence. Cisco and its partners offer a system-level service and support approach that can help you create and maintain a resilient, converged network that meets your business needs.
SUMMARY

Cisco Unified IP IVR helps remove the constraints of PSTN circuit-based IVR applications by IP-enabling IVR applications and creating connections to Web-based content. Cisco Unified IP IVR is constructed to exploit the power of IP-based communications. With its powerful service-creation environment, enterprises can rapidly develop and deploy IVR applications to provide advanced self-service and enhanced call control applications to improve overall customer satisfaction, continuing their evolution toward a true Customer Interaction Network.