interactIVResponse
When Is It Time to Upgrade Your Trusty Rusty IVR?
By Steve Brown, VP of Sales, Pronexus
Pronexus has been in the interactive voice response (IVR) business for over fifteen years so over the years we have had countless discussions with long-term Pronexus VBVoice as well as competitor customers about upgrading their IVR applications.
Naturally every customer wants the best possible “mileage” out of their IVR system. But how do you know that it is the time to upgrade your IVR solution? Depending on how old your IVR system is, some of the drivers for upgrading your IVR solution may include:
1. Current IVR solution is limited and inflexible
Your IVR system is part of the customer experience and can in some cases provide a differentiator from the competition. In contrast, an IVR that has seen its better days or whose functionality drives customers crazy may not only give a bad image of your organization but may make some customers take their business elsewhere.
- Modern IVR platforms enable building better and more sophisticated IVR systems
- Modern ASR and TTS technologies allow you to add natural-sounding voice in more languages, with better accuracy and at a lower cost
- Modern IVR platforms allow you to build those better and more sophisticated applications more easily and faster
2. Current IVR system is jeopardized by outdated infrastructure
IVR applications running on old, unsupported operating systems or connecting to old, unsupported voice cards are at risk. In case of card or computer failure it may be impossible to find replacement hardware and software, potentially leading to long and costly service outages. Being proactive and upgrading your IVR can help avoid angry customers, lost revenue and upset management.
3. You are looking to move to VoIP
Advances in technology and infrastructure have improved Voice over IP (VoIP) quality and made it easy and affordable to deploy. SIP has become the preferred protocol of choice and SIP trunking is replacing many traditional proprietary lines. Pronexus recommends implementing IVR solutions on VoIP IVR where available due to the cost advantages and ease of deployment.
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When Is It Time to Upgrade Your Trusty Rusty IVR?
Outdated infrastructure is really something we see too often in our day-to-day issues with customers. Officially, our support policy covers 2 versions back, so with the release of VBVoice 7, this means we only continue to support VBVoice 5.6 and 5.5, and support for 5.4 has now ended. If you are running a VBVoice version older than VBVoice 5.4, it’s definitely time to upgrade. VBVoice 5.3 and below used the Dialogic SR 5.11 drivers, which have been unsupported by Dialogic for over 2 years now. The same is true for HMP 2.0.
Older hardware and unsupported drivers make it much more difficult for us to troubleshoot customer issues. Even then, if we are able to determine that it IS a problem in the Dialogic drivers, Dialogic will no longer troubleshoot or patch issues in these older drivers. This means the solution is to upgrade anyway. By proactively upgrading, you take control of the process and have time to develop a smooth migration path and address any issues you encounter, instead of having to do this while you are “under the gun”.
Definitely a good idea to upgrade your outdated and legacy IVR systems to ensure it is always up and running and your customers/callers are happy.
Older operating systems are another big issue. If you are running VBVoice 5.3 or older, chances are that you are using Windows 2000 or even Windows NT! (Win98 anyone?) Microsoft is no longer supporting these operating systems and no longer even releases Windows updates for them, which means as times goes on they will become more and more vulnerable to attacks. Anti-virus and other application developers have also already dropped or are in the process of dropping support for these operating systems. This is another big indication that it’s time to upgrade.
In relation to your first point, current IVR solution being limited or inflexible, upgrading from VB6 to Visual Studio.NET provides some advantages for IVR developers.
When the visual development tools were becoming more popular, GUI developers felt that a 254 control upper limit on a single form in VB6 was adequate as a practical form or dialog will have a fairly limited number of controls.
That requirement was pushed much higher for non-GUI applications such as IVR applications that are based on the Pronexus VBVoice IVR toolkit.
With VB6, one had to deploy some workarounds to get past the control limit in order to build full-fledged IVR solutions. However, upgrading to Visual Studio.NET completely removes this barrier. With Visual Studio.NET the number of components is limited only by the availability of system resources.