Intelligent IVR for Market Research

Sytel has enhanced its Market Research (MR) call center offering by adding Intelligent IVR software (Interactive Voice Response system) to its product suite.

Using the familiar and easy-to-use Forsta interface, users can select and upload recordings to be played. The question order, branching logic and the range of digits that are valid for each response are all defined within the survey authoring solution.

Traditional IVRs are often complex to program and inflexible. But this is an intelligent IVR technology which can vary its questions dynamically based on survey quota fulfilment as well as allowing for complex logic, all of which is defined in the Forsta survey authoring tool. The result is fully-automated, efficient outbound calling.

Additional benefits:

• Use of Forsta diary management to schedule IVR interviews and reschedule dependent on interviewer responses.
• Speed – more immediate than web surveys, no need to wait for respondents.
• Discretion – if the research is personal in nature, respondents are often more comfortable talking to an automated system than a person.
• Easily changed – if an event occurs which requires a survey to be amended, it can be quickly changed within the Forsta survey designer to add a new question.
• Consistency –
  • The audio message will be the same wording each time.
  • An interviewer can become tired. Playing recorded messages ensures the same enthusiasm is delivered each time. The message is consistent to all respondents.
  • No need for a supervisor to listen in and monitor
• Multilingual – where a live survey requires multilingual agents to contact respondents in different languages, an IVR survey is recorded just once in each language.
• Maintains many benefits associated with a predictive dialer – e.g. changing the outbound CLI to increase the chance of a call being answered.

Sytel’s key strengths:

• Configuration of the Outbound CLI to increase the likelihood of the call being answered.
• Recording of both parties of the call can be performed as well as call setup.
• Integration with SIP telephony networks.
• Industry leading call classification – out of service numbers can be identified.
• Answer machine detection – answering machines can be detected and filtered out.

Sytel’s close relationship with CATI software companies and constant dialogue with the MR call center industry ensures that new features such as this are released regularly.