Opinion-8 IVR survey technology
"Through the use of Opinion-8, we are now able to prove that we provide a high quality and transparent service to our clients."
Rachel Robinson, Group Business Development Director
Teleperformance
Automated telephone surveys for customer research
Opinion-8 IVR survey technology is an automated telephone survey system, developed and managed by Square Systems, providing integrated IVR, web and SMS surveys for market research, employee feedback and monitoring call centre customer satisfaction. This page describes how and why Opinion-8 was developed. There is a dedicated Opinion-8 website if you would like to learn more about conducting automated telephone surveys.
The need: Call centre customer feedback technology
As experienced suppliers to the call centre industry, Square Systems identified the need for innovative customer experience management technology that would help contact centres get feedback from customers easily and instantly to accurately assess quality of service of both telephone and email/web interactions. The challenges in developing such a tool were numerous. Speed of implementation and the subsequent rate at which customer-led features could be added to the system were key design considerations. The future requirement to support CPE installations, particularly in light of the rapidly changing and converging telecommunications, required any solution to be either cross-platform - or facilitate a future platform migration. A hosted system where clients subscribe on a 'pay per use' basis would need to be intrinsically 'multi-tenant'. An Internet-hosted solution with many users meant that security, stability and redundancy of operation were key considerations.
Opinion-8 IVR automated telephone survey tool
Opinion-8 IVR automated telephone survey system was developed and went live as a hosted service in February 2004. The same year it was shortlisted as finalist in the Best New Product entry at the European Call Centre Awards. In spring 2005 Opinion-8 IVR survey technology became available as customer premise equipment (CPE).
IVR technology used for Opinion-8
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.
The benefits
- Opinion-8 recognised as an innovative and effective customer experience management tool at the European Call Centre Awards 2004.
- A large number of companies including call centres and market research companies now subscribe to the hosted service and several blue-chip companies have purchased the system in house.
- The open source IVR technology used has proven to be highly stable and secure. The freedom of information inherent in the open source movement has helped us to quickly implement customer-led changes.