Opinion-8 IVR survey technology
The IVR survey technology Opinion-8 is based on uses established industry standard software and hardware with demonstrated ability to perform reliably. The hosted Opinion-8 IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system for handling the phone surveys is capable of handling over 1000 simultaneous calls. The Opinion-8 website runs on Linux servers using the Apache web server, a combination of technology which hosts the majority of the world's web sites.
Technology: Opinion-8 IVR survey requirements
No specific infrastructure, software or technology is required to use Opinion-8, just standard IT equipment commonly found in every organisation's offices. A PC with internet access is all that is required for accessing Opinion-8's management information portal. All reporting tools are browser based and work in any recent browser. To listen to audio comments, a PC with sound card and speakers is required. The soundcard should support 8 KHz Wav files.
Contact centre IVR survey technology
To enable call centre customers to participate in the survey, agents must have telephones that can transfer calls to an outside line. If contact centre data is to be attached to the survey, the agent's PC needs to have internet access.
Technical Architecture of Opinion-8 IVR surveys
Opinion-8 is a distributed system with different components of the system running on different computers which may be in different locations. An Opinion-8 telephone survey is handled as follows:
- The call arrives on the Opinion-8 voice server
- The voice server makes a request to the controlling web server to run a survey, saying it has a call from a given telephone number
- The Opinion-8 web server sends the appropriate survey to the voice server
- The voice processing equipment in the voice server runs the survey
- At the end of the call the voice equipment sends the survey results and any verbatim comments back to the web server.
Calls to Opinion-8 can be transferred via the Agent, automatically, or you can use call-back. How to transfer calls to post-call IVR surveys - further reading.
Development of Opinion-8 IVR survey technology
When developing Opinion-8 IVR survey technology Square Systems chose an open source LAMP (Linux Apache mySQL PHP) platform to provide the web application and database survey technology. The LAMP architecture was chosen primarily to address security and stability concerns but also because the architecture provides a cost effective route for expansion. The adoption of PHP as the main programming language and mySQL as the database allows the application and database to be entirely cross platform. However, careful development has enabled the application to be largely database independent. During the initial stages of the project, the IVR (Interactive Voice Recognition) component was implemented using Windows servers and Dialogic Telephony, but integration between the various sub-systems was carefully designed however to allow the for the later introduction of the open source Asterisk telecommunications platform as the voice processing system. The move to Asterisk was made shortly after going live and this has been extremely successful. Asterisk's inherent IP switching capability has allowed the Opinion-8 platform to be independent of any one telecommunications carrier, enhancing reliability, scalability and significantly reducing cost.
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