Comparing IVR dealers

Since the features and capabilities of many IVR systems are fairly similar, it's important to choose a IVR dealer who combines technical expertise with good business practices. Here are some characteristics of dealers who will make sure you get the most for your investment.

Experience and longevity are both important: look for companies with a long track record of success installing systems like the one you want. Familiarity with companies of your size and in your industry is also helpful.

If possible, you may even want to take a tour of prospective vendors' facilities. Seeing their staff and offices for yourself can help you separate low-end dealers from qualified vendors.

Find out what software and hardware their systems use: in the IVR market, some manufacturers sell direct, others go through resellers, and some do both. To avoid misunderstandings later, make sure you know if you're dealing with a manufacturer or a reseller. Resellers can be an excellent sales channel, but it's important for you to check out the software publisher as well, to make sure they'll be around to support the system for years to come.

Service considerations
Simply put, your IVR system should always be available to callers. Uptimes topping 99.9% are to be expected — and you should make sure that the dealer you work with has service policies in place to make that happen.

Get a detailed outline of customer service policies from each vendor you're evaluating. Find out when each IVR dealer offers support and what communications options are available: you should expect 24 x 7 x 365 access through multiple channels, including telephone, email, and web.

The more essential the IVR is to your business, the stricter the guarantees you should expect. While dealers may not initially offer service level agreements (SLAs), you can always ask for one to be written into a contract. SLAs specify allowable response and resolution times for different types of problems. Make sure that simply answering the phone isn't enough to satisfy the SLA – get language that specifies a resolution.

How to run an evaluation
Outlining your basic needs and existing telecom environment will help you gather some of the information that dealers need to create proposals. Depending on the dealers you speak with, you may need to create a more detailed request for proposal that describes your intended uses and requirements.

Once you get responses from IVR dealers, set up meetings to get demos and ask questions, either in-person or using web conferencing. Some dealers will provide trial software or free demo accounts that let you try their management tools. A hands-on trial is the best way to really evaluate the tools for yourself, so ask for one if you're given only a scripted demo.

Try it yourself
The opportunity to try out features like speech recognition and text-to-speech is important, too. IVR dealers should be able to refer you to real customers using their systems: get phone numbers you can call, and follow through.

Call at busy times and slow times, and have multiple people call to evaluate the accuracy of the speech recognition with different voices and accents. Pay attention to both the overall experience and specific details about how the system sounds, how easy it is to get the information you're looking for, and what happens if you press a button when you shouldn't or provide the wrong information.