By Michael Pastore
Quality communication between businesses and customers is an important part of conducting commerce, and has been from the beginning. Customer communication has evolved rapidly over the last several decades to include printed newsletters and catalogs, e-mails and Web sites, and online tools like Twitter.
For nearly 100 years the telephone has been a central part of the interaction between customers and business. The advent of mobile phones, high-speed networks, and accessories like hands-free devices not only ensures that the phone remains critical to communicating with customers, but it opens new doors as well.
Self-service telephone applications that use an approach called Interactive Voice Response (IVR) are relatively commonplace today. This eBook examines how businesses can take self-service applications to a wholly different level by adding speech and video capabilities to the equation, enabling Interactive Voice and Video Response (IVVR). By taking advantage of the ability to include speech recognition, video and advanced call routing capabilities in a self-service voice application, businesses can enhance the experience for users and get a leg up on the competition. IVVR can also help control costs by further streamlining the involvement of human contacts in customer support business processes.
Thanks to powerful development tools and standards like SMIL, VoiceXML, and CCXML, the creation of IVVR applications is easier than ever before. This eBook is going to take you on a tour of the development process used to create such multi-modal customer experiences. We'll start with a look at the business case for developing IVVR applications, written by Mark Miller, the author of several books on networking technologies.
Then we'll start to explore the nuts and bolts of building such applications with articles by Shari Gould and Steve Apiki that discuss Avaya Dialog Designer, an open-standards based Integrated Development Environment for voice self-service applications.
From there, we'll take a look at the structure of a CCXML application and get into writing some simple CCXML documents. We'll also examine some of the best practices for developing speech grammars, which are the key to more natural interaction and a more pleasant caller experience.
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