Visual Interactive Voice Response (Visual IVR)

Abstract

Since the late 1990’s, companies started to introduce interactive voice response (IVR) systems in their call centers. By querying the customer and receiving the option chosen (number pressed), IVR solutions allows these companies to have universal routing of the calling party (customer) to the service that best suits their needs without requiring a live agent, reducing costs and improving customer experience. Nowadays, with the evolution of mobile technologies, most of the callers use some kind of handheld device such as smartphone or a softphone to call these services which are becoming increasingly more capable of receiving media content such as video or image prior, during or after the call is established. This is where the Visual IVR concept appears as an improved interface for the traditional IVR system by adding rich-media to the user experience, increasing user engagement and proficiency. With the added capability of displaying information and interactive menus to the user, not only can Visual IVR service provider benefit, but also call experiences can be enhanced and improved. This internship focuses on the development of a service to share visual enriched content to VoIP capable devices. The main goal is not only to create a way of sharing this content in the Visual IVR context but also in the context of a normal call between two capable devices.