Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Module
White Pajama, Inc. -- 2002

When you call a customer support number and an automated system with pre-recorded prompts walks you through a set of choices (e.g. "press 1 for Sales, or press 2 for Accounting") you're using an interactive voice response (IVR) system.

Bill designed this IVR editor to be part of White Pajama's web-based callcenter configuration application. His overall objective was to make it easy for callcenter administrators with little training to create, test and manage robust, error-free IVR scripts for their incoming phone lines.

The Script Display
The core of the script editor is a display of the script, formatted in a way that makes it easy even for novices to review and understand the flow of the script.

The Add menu
This menu lets you insert new items into the script. To promote robust, error-free scripting, each item inserts extra steps as needed to handle errors and exceptions. This both teaches and reminds script authors that things don't always go smoothly (the caller might hang up, or key in an unusable entry, etc.).

 

The Edit menu
This menu lets you remove or rearrange lines in the script.

 

Item Editors

Whenever you select a line in a script the appropriate editor for that line is displayed in a separate panel. Each editor lets you set whatever parameters are appropriate for that line: for example to select a recorded message to be played, or to specify in which phone queue to place the caller.

Recorded Message Manager

Also not shown is the companioin module that lets you record, review and manage all the pre-recorded utterances needed by IVR scripts.