IVR Platforms
At their most basic, IVR platforms offer the ability to play and document system prompts, collect touch tone input, have the capability to distinguish spoken output for voice callers (text to speech) and move IVR calls to a particular telephone or call center representative.
IVR Applications
IVR applications lead the platform to notify callers, draw input, and move callers to other lines. Created either by an enterprise, IVR development shop, or by organizations providing IVR applications, they also possess the ability to contact application and current back-end servers to facilitate recovery of records and information.
Back-end servers
Back-end servers are the current and active enterprise servers that store the necessary corporate or customer data. It can take account of mainframes, databases, Java and other application servers as well as third party solutions and information.
Telephony Infrastructure
Telephony infrastructure is comprised of telephone lines, Automatic Call Distributors (ACDs) for call centers, and call switching equipment. Telephone lines designated to accommodate IVR can be regular analog lines, digital ISDN lines or digital T1. These lines are linked on one side to the IVR platform, and on the opposite side, linked to the call switching tool (consisting of Voice over IP entry, corporate PBXs, Telco switches, or directly to a call center network through an ACD.)
