IVRs as a delivery platform
In the field on Entertainment, IVR is used as the major delivery mode for "Music on demand". There was this famous article on "Who is your competitor" where they talk about the biggest player in music and surprisingly the answer to this is "Airtel". If I have to compare this as to where it fits in "Michael Porters 5 force", it is threat from substitute which is really difficult to determine. IVR has a big advantage of the fact that:
1) Gives a personal touch as voice is medium of communication and emotions can be expressed.
2) Can be conveniently used by rural/old people (people who resist change) and uneducated people.
IVR is a delivery platform which can make money (Fortune at the bottom of the pyramid).
Various other alerts and services like Astro, Vaastu, Personality tests, quiz, games are also delivered on IVRs. When it comes to the commerce stream, IVR is mainly used for mBanking, Ticketing, etc. Because of "CONNECT" via IVR, voice SMS is a increasingly used service for Social VAS. With IVR as a delivery platform for enterprise VAS, we have IVR based contact centers, Self help centers and Voice portals too.
Continued tomorrow ... Wap Portals
2 comments:
Purwa,
Good blog. Maybe you could add a bit more about the process of getting on to IVR. How easy or difficult it is it to offer a service on IVR if one has the content. What does the whole process involve?
Vinod
Hi Vinod,
Thanks so much. IVR service can be offered in two forms:
1) In-bound calling
2) Out-bound calling
Inbound and outbound are with respect to the service provider. For outbound, you will need to scrub the numbers for NDNC and hence not all the vendors will offer outbound.
Once, you decide on the above, the next thing you need to think about is the call flow. Lets take an example of a voice portal. The user calls a number xxxxxxxx. He hears something like:
1) Dial 1 for English and dial 2 for Hindi.
2) Wait for input
3) Dial 1 for Song 1, 2 for Song 2 and 9 to get back to main menu
etc etc
Once you have a tentative call flow in mind, you will need to connect to someone like Netcore, One97, etc who offer IVR service. They company will help you to freeze the call flow and also identify voice tags in the call flow. You as a content provider will only be responsible for providing the final content voice files. Rest will be done by the IVR platform providers.
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