1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of telecommunications, and more particularly to a system and method for automatically placing commissary orders through the telephone system of an institution, based on a comparison between identifiers and item codes provided by a user and user status and commissary inventory information, respectively, stored in the system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventional Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems operate in conjunction with Public Switched Telephone Networks (PSTN) to automatically provide information and, in some cases, limited transaction control to authorized parties accessing the system from off-site locations. Typical IVR systems capable of collecting data and carrying out user-initiated transactions are known, for example, in the banking industry. Such systems provide bank clients with access to account information and implement client initiated funds transfers by telephone over a PSTN. These IVR systems accept industry standard, dual-toned multi-frequencies (DTMF) and provide selected information and transaction options in response to specific keyed sequences. Transactions are cued by analog voice messages which are often concatenated to provide spoken phrases or sentences conveying instructions or requested information.
The use of such IVR systems in conjunction with a premise-based telephone system of an institution for collecting orders for the commissary of the institution is not known. For example, in institutions such as jails and correctional facilities which employ collect-only telephone systems, the placing of commissary orders is typically a manual process whereby orders are transmitted to a clerk who records the order on paper or in a computer system for subsequent processing. Such manual systems are slow and paper intensive. Therefore, there is a need for commissary systems compatible with the premise-based telephone system of an institution for automatically collecting and processing commissary orders.