Automated Order Entry The FAR Voice

Take Orders 24 Hours a Day, 7 Days a Week

Automated order entry gives you the ability to take orders 24 hours per day, seven days a week while reducing labor costs and 800 phone charges. It also provides better responsiveness to your customers.

Who Can Use It? top of page

Many types of businesses have order entry requirements that lend themselves to partial or complete automation. The best candidates are wholesale and distributor operations, or businesses with a large number of repeat customers. In each of these cases, the customers have an ID number that specifies the delivery address, credit status or payment terms, and other crucial information.

How Does it Work? top of page

A customer calls, enters their customer number, and is presented a menu in a voice of your choice (not a computer voice): To enter an order, press 1. For the current status of a previously entered order, press 2. To talk to an operator, press 3. The choice of talking to a human is available only during business hours. Order entry is a simple matter of entering product numbers and quantities. The voice system confirms each entry by voicing the product name and quantity back to the caller. After entry the system also provides stock status and shipping date information to the caller.

How Does it Do That? top of page

The voice system is connected directly to your order entry computer by a link called terminal emulation. What this means is that the voice computer 'looks' like a standard terminal and human operator to your order entry computer (called the 'host' computer). No programming changes are needed on the host computer or its software. The voice system can do anything that one of your operators can do from a terminal enter orders, delete orders, change order dates, get stock status, get shipping status, etc.

Any of these functions that you choose to implement can be made available to customers through the use of a touch tone phone. You can even choose to allow different groups of customers to have some functions and not others. You can provide field sales persons with their own menu of functions.

A provision can be included to allow customers to leave voice messages attached to certain orders or entries so that special instructions can be accommodated.

My Order Entry Requirements are Special top of page

All applications of this type are custom. Every installation has its own requirements. That is why we have developed a very high level voice application language, The FAR Voice, to implement these applications. Without such a language, the unique requirements of each business make a voice system expensive to create and difficult to maintain. With The FAR Voice, custom order entry applications are inexpensive to create and easy to maintain.

The FAR Voice is the reason that you can afford to take advantage of the savings in phone bills and personnel that such a system can provide to your company.