ABSTRACT
Speech technologies appear in many different types of products and serve many different needs. The vast majority of IVR applications exist to provide service to the people who call them, making them a type of self-service technology (SST). An IVR might simply route calls to skill groups in a call center (Armistead, Kiely, Hole, & Prescott, 2002) or might allow callers to perform self-service, but most IVRs do a combination of routing and self-service. In a sense, routing is a type of self-service because rather than talking to a general operator for call direction, the caller must make choices to connect to the appropriate skill group. Thus in contrast to complete self-service, skill-based routing ends with the caller connected to a human to complete the requested service.
