Despite today’s challenging economic climate, investments in speech self-service have continued. For many businesses of all sizes, a shift in economic strategies has led them away from traditional on-premises solutions to hosted and managed service deployments. In fact, this is becoming the fastest growing sector of the IVR market, far outpacing on-premises sales.

But making the decision to outsource all or part of your customer service operation is not an easy one. Though hosted solutions have garnered a lot of attention because of their benefits with respect to cost, speed of deployment, and flexibility, the decision should not be based on those factors alone. The decision to implement hosted or on-premise solutions should also be determined by the current infrastructure, your IT staff’s knowledge, and what you expect the system to do in the future.

In this roundtable, panelists will discuss the types of hosted and on-premises solutions available and the pros and cons of each, as well as:

• How the incentives built into a hosted agreement impact the customer’s long-term results;
• How the arrangement should be set up for you to realize maximum savings;
• The capabilities to look for when selecting a provider;
• The role of monitoring, reporting, and tuning;
• The role of caller behavior analysis;
• The impact of service-level agreements on performance, availability, and caller experience;
• The limitations when handling different interaction types, such as touch-tone, mobile, speech, and authentication/verification; and
• Integration with customer and third-party data/solutions to meet unique call requirements.