One of the worst parts of dealing with a voice menu is the painfully slow process by which the “voice” lists all your options. Doesn’t it seem like yours is always the last one listed?

Now, thanks to a new rollout from Enghouse (News - Alert) Interactive, users that need to get some information will have a visual option available to them.

Enghouse’s Mobile IVR Navigator presents a lightweight, highly visual interactive voice response (IVR)-like experience that users can actually see and utilize via their handheld screen.

"The ability to visualize and manipulate the Mobile IVR menu sets a new standard for how mobile users can engage an organization," said Christoph Mosing, president of Enghouse Interactive (News - Alert), debuting the service at a recent trade show in Chicago. "We are elated to introduce this breakthrough product to the marketplace, which represents a true industry innovation in customer interaction technology.”

According to the company, the new framework makes mobile applications easy to create and deploy, reducing costs, customer effort and frustration. Built on top of the company's current IVR platform, Enghouse Interactive Communication Portal, Mobile IVR Navigator takes any call flow and presents it visually to smartphone or tablet users via their screen.

“Customers are able to see the menus and prompts instantly on their screens rather than having to wait to hear them, enabling them to quickly click their way through the menu levels, reducing the overall interaction cycle time,” the company said. For anyone who’s had to sit through endless lists of options, that offering alone is a tremendous step up.

Even better, Mobile IVR Navigator further reduces customer contact times by capturing key information prior to any actual engagement between agent and caller, and by allowing the caller and agent to share documents, pictures and other pertinent data prior to this stage of the process.

With handheld users becoming more adept today at texting and keying in other information, this would seem to be an idea whose time has come at last.