Services

Premium Rate Numbers are telephone numbers for telephone calls during which certain services are provided, and for which prices higher than are usually charged. Unlike a normal call, part of the call charge is paid to the service provider, thus enabling businesses to be funded via calls. While the billing is different, calls are usually routed in the same way as they are for a toll-free telephone number, regardless of the location and area code used. These telephone numbers are usually allocated from a national telephone numbering plan in a way which makes them stand out from other numbers. Telephone companies typically offer blocking services to allow telephone customers to prevent access to these number ranges from their telephones. In some jurisdictions, telephone companies are required by law to offer such blocking.

Entertainment, education and tech support are a very common use of Premium Rate Numbers. Other services include directory enquiries, weather forecasts, competitions and voting (especially relating to television shows). Diplomatic services, such as the US embassy in London or the UK Embassy in Washington, have also charged premium rates for calls from the general public.

In some European countries it is common for organizations to operate customer service lines on Premium Rate Numbers using prefixes that fall outside the scope of the country's Premium Rate Number regulations. Therefore, in contrast to North America where customer service numbers are typically free of charge to the caller, consumers in some European countries often pay a premium above the cost of a normal telephone call.

As an alternative to official Premium Rate Numbers, International Premium rate Numbers are being used in countries where domestic Premium Rate Numbers are not available for some reason. The great advantage of International Premium Rate Numbers is their accessibility. Domestic Premium Rate Numbers are always accessible only from the country of their origin whereas International Premium Rate Numbers are accessible from almost all over the world. WPT is currently offering over 500 different terminations of International Premium rate Numbers. Find the full list here.

Call centers use IVR systems to identify and segment callers. The ability to identify customers allows services to be tailored according to the customer profile. The caller can be given the option of waiting in a queue, choosing an automated service, or requesting a call-back. The system may obtain caller line identification (CLI) data from the network to help identify or authenticate the caller. Additional caller authentication data may include the account number, personal information, password and biometrics (such as voice print).

When an IVR system answers multiple phone numbers, the use of DNIS ensures that the correct application and language is executed. A single large IVR system can handle calls for thousands of applications, each with its own phone numbers and script.

IVR also enables customer prioritization. In a system whereby individual customers may have a different status, the service automatically prioritizes the individual's call and moves customers to the front of a specific queue. Prioritization may also be based on the DNIS and reason cited for making the call.

Smaller companies and start-ups can also use an IVR system to make their business appear larger than it is. For example, a caller never needs to know that their Sales and Support calls are routed to the same person.

In addition to interacting with customer information systems and databases, IVRs will also log call detail information into its own database for auditing, performance report, and future IVR system enhancements.

CTI allows a contact center or organization to gather information about the caller as a means of directing their enquiry to the appropriate agent. CTI can transfer relevant information about the individual customer and the IVR dialog from the IVR to the agent desktop using a screen pop-up, making for a more effective and efficient service.

IVR may be used by survey organizations to ask more sensitive questions where investigators are concerned that a respondent might feel less comfortable providing these answers to a human interlocutor (such as questions about drug use or sexual behavior). In some cases an IVR system can be used in the same survey in conjunction with a human interviewer. For example, during the survey the interviewer might inform the respondent that for the next series of questions they will be sent to an IVR system to continue or complete the interview.

Voice-Activated Dialing

Voice-Activated Dialing (VAD) IVR systems are used to automate routine enquiries to switchboard or PABX (Private Automatic Branch eXchange) operators, and are used in many hospitals and large businesses to reduce caller waiting time. An additional function is the ability to allow external callers to page staff and transfer the inbound call to the paged person.

Entertainment and information

Some of the largest installed IVR platforms are used for tele-voting on television game shows, such as Pop Idol and Big Brother, which can generate enormous call spikes. Often the network provider will have to deploy call gapping in the PSTN to prevent network overload.

Anonymous access

IVR systems allow callers to obtain data relatively anonymously. Hospitals and clinics have used IVR systems to allow callers to receive anonymous access to test results. This is information that could easily be handled by a person but the IVR system is used to maintain privacy and avoid potential embarrassment of sensitive information or test results. Users are given a pass-code to access their results.

Contact: sales@world-premium-telecom.com

Disclaimer: World Premium Telecom numbers can only be used for legitimate and genuine phone calls. No fraudulent use will be accepted. Fraudulent traffic will not be paid and will be regarded as a violation of the contractual terms, with all the legal consequences.

Clinical trials

IVR systems are used by pharmaceutical companies and contract research organizations to conduct clinical trials and manage the large volumes of data generated. The caller will respond to questions in their preferred language and their responses will be logged into a database and possibly recorded at the same time to confirm authenticity. Applicationsinclude patient randomization and drug supply management. They are also used in recording patient diaries and questionnaires.[2]

Outbound calling

IVR systems can be used for outbound calls, as IVR systems are more intelligent than many predictive dialer systems, and can use Call Progress Detection to recognize different line conditions as follows:

• Answer (the IVR can tell the customer who is calling and ask them to wait for an agent)
• Answered by voice mail or answering machine (in these circumstances the IVR system can leave a message)
• Fax tone (the IVR can leave a TIFF image fax message)
• Divert messages (the IVR will abandon the call)
• No answer

Other uses

Other common IVR services include:

• Mobile — Pay-As-You-Go account funding; registration; mobile purchases, such as ring tones and logos
• Banking — balance, payments, transfers, transaction history
• Retail & Entertainment — orders, bookings, credit & debit card payments
• Utilities — meter readings
• Travel — ticket booking, flight information, check-in
• Weather forecasts, water, road and ice conditions

Technologies used

DTMF decoding and speech recognition are used to interpret the caller's response to voice prompts. DTMF tones are entered via the telephone keypad.

Two main varieties of speech recognition are used in IVR: that based upon predefined grammars (used in "directed" dialogues), and that based on statistically trained language models (used in "natural language" dialogues). Directed dialogues prompt the caller with specific questions or options. Natural language dialogues employ open questions (e.g. "How can I help you?"), are more conversational, and can interpret free-form responses.

Other technologies include using Text-To-Speech (TTS) to speak complex and dynamic information, such as e-mails, news reports or weather information. TTS is computer generated synthesized speech that is no longer the robotic voice traditionally associated with computers. Real voices create the speech in fragments that are spliced together (concatenated) and smoothed before being played to the caller.

An IVR can be deployed in several different ways:

1. Equipment installed on the customer premises
2. Equipment installed in the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network)
3. Application service provider (ASP) / Hosted IVR

IVR can be used to provide a more sophisticated voice mail experience to the caller. For example, the IVR could ask if the caller wishes to hear, edit, forward or remove a message.

An automatic call distributor (ACD) is often the first point of contact when calling many larger businesses. An ACD uses digital storage devices to play greetings or announcements, but typically routes a caller without prompting for input. An IVR can play announcements and request an input from the caller. This information can be used to profile the caller and route the call to an agent with a particular skill set. (A skill set is a function applied to a group of call-center agents with a particular skill.)

Interactive voice response can be used to front-end a call center operation by identifying the needs of the caller. Information can be obtained from the caller such as an account number. Answers to simple questions such as account balances or pre-recorded information can be provided without operator intervention. Account numbers from the IVR are often compared to caller ID data for security reasons and additional IVR responses are required if the caller ID does not match the account record.

IVR call flows are created in a variety of ways. A traditional The ability to use XML-driven applications allows a Web server to act as the application server, freeing the IVR developer to focus on the call flow. It was widely believed that developers would no longer require specialized programming skills; however, this has been proven[citation needed] to be misguided as IVR applications need to understand the human reaction to the application dialog.

Higher level IVR development tools are available to further simplify the application development process. A call flow diagram can be drawn with a GUI tool and the presentation layer (typically VoiceXML) can be automatically generated. In addition, these tools normally provide extension mechanisms for software integration, such as an HTTP interface to a Web site and a Java interface for connecting to a database. In telecommunications, an audio response unit (ARU) is a device that provides synthesized voice responses to DTMF key presses by processing calls based on (a) the call-originator input, (b) information received from a database, and (c) information in the incoming call, such as the time of day.

ARUs increase the number of information calls handled and provide consistent quality in information retrieval.

Structure

Applications are usually broken into logical chunks called "tiers", where every tier is assigned a role. Traditional applications comprise only of 1 tier, which resides on the client machine, but web applications lend themselves to an n-tiered approach by nature. Though many variations are possible, the most common structure is the three-tiered application. In its most common form, the three tiers are called presentation, application and storage, in this order. A web browser is the first tier (presentation), an engine using some dynamic Web content technology (such as ASP, ASP.NET, CGI, ColdFusion, JSP/Java, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails or Struts2) is the middle tier (application logic), and a database is the third tier (storage).[6] The web browser sends requests to the middle tier, which services them by making queries and updates against the database and generates a user interface.

For more complex applications, a 3-tier solution may fall short, and it may be beneficial to use an n-tiered approach, where the greatest benefit is breaking the business logic, which resides on the application tier, into a more fine-grained model. Another benefit may be adding an integration tier that separates the data tier from the remaining tiers by providing an easy-to-use interface to access the data. For example, client data would be accessed by calling a "list_clients()" function instead of making an SQL query directly against the client table on the database. This allows the underlying database to be replaced without making any change to the other tiers.

There are some who view a web application as a two-tier architecture. This can be a "smart" client that performs all the work and queries a "dumb" server, or a "dumb" client that relies on a "smart" server. The client would handle the presentation tier, the server would have the database (storage tier), and the business logic (application tier) would be on one of them or on both. While this increases the scalability of the applications and separates the display and the database, it still doesn't allow for layers to be truly specialised, so most applications will outgrow this model.

Business use

An emerging strategy for application software companies is to provide web access to software previously distributed as local applications. Depending on the type of application, it may require the development of an entirely different browser-based interface, or merely adapting an existing application to use different presentation technology. These programs allow the user to pay a monthly or yearly fee for use of a software application without having to install it on a local hard drive. A company which follows this strategy is known as an application service provider (ASP), and ASPs are currently receiving much attention in the software industry.

In the cloud computing model, web applications are Software as a Service (SaaS). Business applications are provided as SaaS for enterprises for a fixed or usage-dependent fee. Other web applications are offered free of charge, often generating income from advertisements shown on the web application interface.

Writing web applications

Writing of web applications is often simplified by open source software such as Wordpress, Magento or MediaWiki called web application frameworks. These frameworks facilitate rapid application development by allowing a development team to focus on the parts of their application which are unique to their goals without having to resolve common development issues such as user management. While many of these frameworks are open source, this is by no means a requirement.

The use of web application frameworks can often reduce the number of errors in a program, both by making the code simpler, and by allowing one team to concentrate on the framework while another focuses on a specified use case. In applications which are exposed to constant hacking attempts on the Internet, security-related problems can be caused by errors in the program. Frameworks can also promote the use of best practices such as GET after POST.

In addition, there is potential for the development of applications on Internet operating systems, although currently there e not many viable platforms that fit this model.

Applications

Examples of browser applications are simple office software (word processors, online spreadsheets, and presentation tools), but can also include more advanced applications such as project management, computer-aided design, video editing and point-of-sale.

Benefits

• Web applications do not require any complex "roll out" procedure to deploy in large organizations. A compatible web browser is all that is needed;
• Browser applications typically require little or no disk space on the client;
• They require no upgrade procedure since all new features are implemented on the server and automatically delivered to the users;
• Web applications integrate easily into other server-side web procedures, such as email and searching.
• They also provide cross-platform compatibility in most cases (i.e., Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.) because they operate within a web browser window.
• With the advent of HTML5, programmers can create richly interactive environments natively within browsers. Included in the list of new features are native audio, video and animations, as well as improved error handling.

Drawbacks

• In practice, web interfaces, compared to thick clients, typically force significant sacrifice to user experience and basic usability.
• Web applications absolutely require compatible web browsers. If a browser vendor decides not to implement a certain feature, or abandons a particular platform or operating system version, this may affect a huge number of users;
• Standards compliance is an issue with any non-typical office document creator, which causes problems when file sharing and collaboration becomes critical;
• Browser applications rely on application files accessed on remote servers through the Internet. Therefore, when connection is interrupted, the application is no longer usable. However, if it uses HTML5 API's such as Offline Web application caching,[9] it can be downloaded and installed locally, for offline use. Google Gears, although no longer in active development, is a good example of a third party plugin for web browsers that provides additional functionality for creating web applications;
• Since many web applications are not open source, there is also a loss of flexibility, making users dependent on third-party servers, not allowing customizations on the software and preventing users from running applications offline (in most cases). However, if licensed, proprietary software can be customized and run on the preferred server of the rights owner;
• They depend entirely on the availability of the server delivering the application. If a company goes bankrupt and the server is shut down, the users have little recourse. Traditional installed software keeps functioning even after the demise of the company that produced it (though there will be no updates or customer service);
• Likewise, the company has much greater control over the software and functionality. They can roll out new features whenever they wish, even if the users would like to wait until the bugs have been worked out before upgrading. The option of simply skipping a weak software version is often not available. The company can foist unwanted features on the users or cut costs by reducing bandwidth. Of course, companies will try to keep the good will of their customers, but the users of web applications have fewer options in such cases unless a competitor steps in and offers a better product and easy migration;
• The company can theoretically track anything the users do. This can cause privacy problems.