Telecommunications provider Verizon Business has expanded availability of its Hosted Interactive Voice Response service to the European market. The fully managed, advanced voice response service is aimed at organizations with large or geographically dispersed contact center operations to help improve their efficiency and enhance their overall customer satisfaction.

Verizon Hosted IVR uses the full potential of the network, enabling centers to provide sufficient capacity to handle customer calls. Customer enquiries are directly routed to the appropriate agent while call transfers are set up on a network level, preventing infrastructure congestion and lowering costs.

Organizations can more effectively manage their call-agent resources and network capacity with the solution's standard responses to questions, which are made available through self-service features. The solution also enables automatic call routing to alternate contact center locations when needed, enhancing business continuity capabilities.

"Customers requiring support for complex installation issues or with service-related queries still see the telephone and a live agent as their primary resource," says Roberta Mackintosh, executive director global voice at Verizon Business. "Any customer-facing organisation therefore remains under constant pressure to provide effective and responsive customer support to maintain satisfaction, but increasingly needs to do so in a cost- and resource-efficient manner."