What does implementation involve?

Implementation of a voice response service involves:

• Recording voice segments
• Designing and building prompts
• Designing and building state tables
• Designing and building 3270 server scripts
• Designing, coding, and building custom server programs
• Testing and debugging components separately and together

We cannot stress too much that testing is vital to the success of your voice response service. Not only functional testing, but also getting users involved in early trials, and evaluating their experiences. Early user involvement in design should ensure that you don’t find reach the beta-test stage before finding too many usability problems that are costly to fix, but you should also ensure that the service is tried out by a limited set of users before going live.

There is a gray area between implementation and putting your voice response service into production. You may think of the following tasks as belonging to implementation, as you will certainly need some resources with which to test. However, you should consider these to be administration tasks that belong to the packaging and distribution or maintenance and support phases:

• Creating application definitions
• Exporting application packages
• Importing application packages
• Creating application profiles
• Defining mailboxes, distribution lists, and subscriber classes
• Ensuring that system parameters are appropriately defined