CTI论坛(ctiforum)12月10日消息（记者 杨佳林）：Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems are heavily utilized by many mission-critical or 24x7 operations, such as hospitals, banks, emergency notification systems and companies with a global employee or customer base. A lot has been written about business continuity planning in call center environments, but how do companies with mission-critical IVR solutions protect and proactively monitor their IVR to ensure maximum uptime? Causes and Consequences of IVR Downtime IVR systems can fail for a variety of reasons including power outage, server hardware failure, application error, as well as Telco or VoIP infrastructure interruption. Loss of IVR uptime may result in decreased revenue, legal and publicity issues, as well as in increased customer attrition. Lack of Maintenance May Leave You Scrambling There are many avenues for protecting an IVR solution. A straightforward approach of server duplication and imaging or keeping spare/backup hardware on hand is something that is typically used for network purposes. More and more, IVR systems are receiving the same attention in order to avoid or recover from server-level failures. Outdated software and hardware can also pose a threat. “For example running your IVR on a 10-year old computer is not prudent for mission-critical operations,” says Sean White, Pronexus Telecom Support Engineer. “If you haven’t kept up with the maintenance of your IVR solution and the infrastructure that it runs on, you may be left scrambling if the computer or its operating system fails”. Some other ways to protect your IVR system include a backup power supply and even a duplicate system with load balancing and automatic failover. Modern data center technologies like virtualization and VoIP are making protecting IVR systems more streamlined. To ensure maximum uptime, protecting the IVR system may not be enough. The other part of the equation should include proactive monitoring of the IVR system. When you hear about a problem with the IVR system from an angry customer, it is already too late. The chances are that there are tens of other frustrated customers who didn’t report the issue but may talk about it to their friends and family members as well as anybody on Facebook or Twitter. IVR Monitoring Has Wide-reaching Benefits IVR monitoring solutions essentially call your IVR at a pre-determined interval, for example every 15 minutes, and alert you if there is no answer so that you can take timely action. “As an IVR solution provider it is essential to our customers that we offer a fail-safe IVR solution,” says Denis Solodovnikov, Senior Client Application Architect for Vocantas, an IVR company specializing in the healthcare, higher education and utilities verticals. Denis finds that IVR monitoring and the maximum uptime that it delivers have wide-reaching benefits beyond revenue and customer retention: “The IVR monitoring solution we use is one more edge we give our customers over their competition.”

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