:::  IP IVR / IVVR WITH DESIGNER  :::

Contact Center includes a comprehensive set of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and Voice Portal capabilities, providing a self-service environment that can handle the most advanced data access and update applications. Such IVR applications often provide the initial contact leading eventually to live contact center agents. When used in this way, IVR and its service creation tools are fully unified with the ACD. The routing decisions are built right in to the IVR service creation process and IVR automatically attaches to the call the information received from the caller and from any related database lookups, so that this information is available to any live agent who eventually receives the call. However, IVR is powerful enough to be used effectively in stand-alone mode as well.

Our approach to IVR is fully consistent with its next generation, all-IP architecture. No dedicated circuit switched ports are used for access to an IVR application. Telephone calls are terminated on standard media gateways and the IVR application is served to the telephone caller across the IP network and out through the media gateway. If and when the call is transferred to a live agent, the initial telephone leg of the call simply stays in place on the same media gateway. This is by far the most efficient and effective way to handle IVR, whether in a pure next generation network (NGN) environment, or an "overlay NGN" created specifically to provide a value-added service such as IVR and Contact Center.

XML-Based Service Creation Tool
Creation and maintenance of IVR applications is made easy with Designer, easy-to-use graphical service creation environment for the design and deployment of call flows in Contact Center systems. Consistent with the unified nature of Contact Center, Designer is an end-to-end GUI tool that defines the complete caller experience including IVR, ACD and CCI (Computer-to-Computer Integration: Global Forte version of CTI), all without costly, multi-vendor platform integrations. Designer lets users perform these functions without resorting to complex, obscure programming techniques.

Traditionally, the task of building call flows and assigning Contact Center resources required highly skilled programmers. But with drag-and-drop interface, even non-programmers can easily and rapidly create and modify call flows to flexibly and efficiently manage Contact Center operations. Furthermore, Designer is browser-based, so it is perfectly suited for hosted contact center applications.

Actions in Designer are represented by icons called "function blocks" – standard call treatment modules that include IVR commands (e.g., "Play Announcement" and "Collect Digits"), ACD routing and queuing commands (e.g., "Transfer" and "Queue to"), NGIN pre-routing commands (e.g., "Time of Day", "% Allocation") and chat, e-mail and other multimedia functions. Creating a call flow with Designer is as simple as dragging and dropping function block icons, interconnecting the icons with arrows and configuring properties for each block. The resulting visual representation of the call flow is translated to an XML representation by designer that can be posted at any URL for immediate execution by the Contact Center platform. There's never a need to take the production system offline, or restart services in order for the newly posted call flow to take effect.

Designer enables the novice user to create simple but powerful call flows, while also providing the flexibility to perform sophisticated tasks, such as integration to external CRM and knowledge base systems. Since designer is extensible, users can create customized blocks to meet their own individual requirements, eliminating the need to wait for future releases to deploy the functionality they need.

Because of its XML architecture, the database that dips into external systems occur entirely within the security confines of the data owner's environment, even when the call flow application is running on a network-based platform as a hosted service for multiple tenants. To facilitate integration, all of the information obtained during the course of a designer call flow is easily passed on to the agent receiving the call and easily exposed to that agent's other applications.