IVR Outsourcing

A few days ago I called up the Citibank call center in Manhattan for a banking query. I was greeted by a lovely female voice who spoke with a fluent East Coast accent. It took me time to understand that it was pre-recorded. I got the answer for my question and later found that the pre-recorded voice was an Interactive Voice Response (IVR). After more research, I found out that the interactive voice response services were provided by a company thousands of miles away.

Welcome to the new age world of outsourcing. With companies in the US looking to lower the cost factors to the company, almost all the non-core processes are being outsourced to countries like India, Malaysia, or Philippines. IVR outsourcing is a concept which involves 3rd party service providers in developing countries to provide automated voice services to companies in countries in the US, UK etc. Technically equipped to handle all the incoming calls, and in some cases outgoing calls, IVR outsourcing allows companies to leverage benefits of a system which will give them services on calls on varied topics.

The range of topics most popularly covered in most of the outsourced IVR services are as follows.

  • Frequently Asked Questions - Customers call in to a toll-free number or a paid number and ask their question over the phone. The IVR system captures the information and provides the information either over the phone or to the email address of the caller.

  • Order Status - Customers call in to enquire about their Order Status for a product which they ordered with the company. The IVR system researches the Supply Chain Management Systems for the Order Status Number and provides the Order Status to the caller.

  • Product Inquiries - Customers call in regards to inquiries about a product. Most of the IVR systems do not prefer giving information of a product over the phone as that could have the customer's telephone bill shoot up really high. The IVR system captures the customer's query and the answer is provided either to his email address or through a call-back option.

IVR outsourcing involves high level of technical sophistication. The most important point is for the company to clearly lay down the Business and Technical Specifications for the product it wants. The company should also provide the 3rd party service provider with the script it wants integrated in the IVR system. For a 3rd party service provider to successfully provide IVR systems, it must have the expertise in DTMF signals and TTS (Text to speech) signaling system. The knowledge and experience of designing applications using VoiceXML, SALT languages allows the 3rd party service provider to design an IVR system as per the client needs.