The company I work for is looking to do a competition in the press, where people can enter either on line, by post or by telephone. For the telephone we would ideally like to have it set up so that people can ring, leave their answer and their details. I know that we do not have the technology to be able to do this ourselves, unless we manually staff phones, so my question is.... Does anyone know any companies out there that can provide this service or advise me of a product with can link with an old Avaya Index switch, that will enable us to do it ourselves?

We are only in the early stages of discussions at the moment but any help would be appreciated.

Sue,
Depending upon the level of promotion involved with this, you may wish to look at outsourcing this to a company that can run this automated program for you.

I have have been involved with promotional activities that have generated millions of originations in 10 seconds. Needless to say you will need to work with your telco to ensure that they have appropriately configured their network for the expected call volume (you really don't want to take down the CO...been their done that) and ensure that you have sufficient ports/lines available.

I hope that I have added value to this discussion.

If I can be of further assistance please contact me directly at ctaylor@thetaylorreachgroup. com

Colin Taylor
The Taylor Reach Group, Inc.

www.thetaylorreachgroup.com

Colin

I'll find out a bit more about exactly what we're looking at and be in touch.
We were thinking outsourcing's the way to go.

Thanks

Sue

Hi Sue

Just seen your post i had a conversation with someone about this last month who are looking to set up a competition line where there are a string of questions to which they have to give an answer before they can move onto the next one

If you would like to email me on jnicholson@businesssystemsuk.com i may be able to help you off forum with and idea

With Regards

John

John

Thanks very much,I may be in touch soon. Though things have gone a bit quite here now. I'll ask some questions and be in touch if the powers that be are still planning to do this.

Sue

It's because I decided it was getting a little close to free advertising.

If your company offers a solution then that's great, and we'd love to hear about it. But for you to post here we really want you to tell us a little bit about the solution itself rather than just posting a "we can do that".

Cheers,
Darryl

Darryl, no problem.

Sue

beAssisted is a product, which is designed for you to automate or partially automate a stream of incoming calls. This can be done though voice recognition and keypad and we can also provide live agent back-up for callers who can't navigate the system. As it is a "made-to-measure" product it can be refined and changed to ensure that the level of caller dropout is minimal in any campaign, therefore reducing costs and maximising return.

Hosting a competition line, as you describe, is well within its scope as is the integration with Avaya telephony, which we have been using extensively for the past 6 years.

Attached is the link to our website for everyone to have a look at

http://www.becogent.com/Templates/beassisted.html

Eamon

Hope this is OK with you Darryl.

Hi Sue

There are a number of ways this can be approached depending on your specific requirements and sensitivities to cost / functionality.

The technology mix incorporated in the appropriate solution (which is likely to influence the cost) depends on the type of competition and the information you need to capture, e.g. does the caller answer a number of multiple-choice questions via the telephone keypad or Speech Recognition, or do they answer a single question by free form speech which can be captured and stored as a recording; or is it a combination of the two? Do you only need to listen to and transcribe the recorded personal details of the winner in order to contact them or do you need to capture all callers’ details automatically and store in a database as text.

Other, fairly simple, matters will also influence the solution and its associated costings, such as expected call volumes, complexity of application and duration of competition.

These types of applications are usually relatively simple to implement as a hosted service and the captured information can be sent to you in a format and on a frequency which you require.

We (that’s ICR) have hosted this kind of service for our customers in the past utilising technologies such as Speech Recognition, IVR, Text to Speech, and taking recordings of caller input which can be transcribed.

Please let me know if you need any further information and I will be pleased to help.

Cheers,

Darren

e-mail: dm@icrgroup.co.uk