IVR Surveys for Pollsters

March 30, 2011

Elections are fast approaching and the Plum Survey platform is already helping pollsters collect real-time data from constituents.  Plum Survey is a platform that lets non-programmers create interactive voice response surveys in minutes.  Once a survey is complete, the Plum IVR platform can make calls to hundreds of thousands of constituents to collect information about issues that affect political campaigns such as:

Job approval ratings
Foreign Policy
Heath Care
The Economy
Local trends
And much, much more

Trail accounts are free and can be accessed at IVR Surveys

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Iron Man 2 and IVR

March 30, 2011

Just saw Iron Man 2 over the weekend and thought it was totally awesome. Robert Downey Jr. does a fantastic job again playing as Tony Stark and Gwyneth Paltrow and Scarlett Johansson do a good job as Pepper Potts and the Black Widow. The storyline was a little cheesy with the whole “hero falling from grace and making a comeback”, but I thought the action scenes more than made up for it.

Another cool part of the movie is when Stark does his thing with the cool technology in his office. He’s moving his arms around, using touch screens all over the place, and giving out all sorts of commands to his robot.

However, one thought came across my mind as I watched the movie. During the final action sequence of the movie, where New York is under attack by the drones, I thought, “They could sure use an IVR system right about now to warn all these people to get out of this area.” Everyone pretty much has a cell phone nowadays and you send out an IVR outbound call to these people, I’m sure they’d pick up to listen to the message.

Just another random IVR thought while watching Iron Man 2.

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How to Define IVR Applicatio...

March 30, 2011

The Plum team sometimes requests that customers assemble a ‘typical use case’ outline so that we can properly evaluate enterprise requirements. This document should focus on the experience that a caller will have when interacting with the automated telephony system. The outline should include a description of any data collected from or provided to the caller.

Here are some questions to contemplate as you assemble your IVR requirements:

1. What will be the user prompts?

2. What menu options will be provided? Think through all necessary options, not just the primary options.

3. What data will need to be collected from the caller? What will be the preferred input format?

4. If information is to be provided to the caller, where is it stored? Is there a preferred access method to this data (XML via HTTP, OBDC, etc.)?

5. How should the system handle mistakes that the user makes?

6. What are the language requirements (e.g., English, Spanish, French)?

7. Will speech recognition be necessary or helpful, or would touch-tone input offer the most efficient and reliable solution?

8. What PBX or telecom integration will be required? Is transfer to a live representative necessary?

9. What administrative interfaces will you need? Will you need to upload audio files for new prompts or greetings?

10. What logging and reporting interfaces are required?

For more information about how to create a use case, or to request samples use cases, please contact Plum at http://www.plumvoice.com/free-consultation

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IVR and Lost VI

March 30, 2011

So, how about that last episode of Lost? They killed off the main Korean leads on the show: Jin and Sun! (by the way, whatever happened to Richard, Ben, and Miles?) The 10 minutes that it took for them to die was a bit heart-wrenching, just because they took so long to be reunited only to be killed off in the next episode.

Not only did they kill Jin and Sun, but they killed off Sayid too! And they didn’t even give him his dramatic moment before he died. So disappointing.

Anyways, the show focuses on Jack again as he’s taken up a leadership role once more and is becoming more like the John Locke we remember before he became the Smoke Monster. In the alternate timeline, we see Jack being a doctor and meeting up with various passengers on Oceanic 815: Locke, Bernard, and Claire. I still think it’d be alot easier though if one of these characters (probably Desmond) just gets a list of the passengers on Oceanic 815 and uses an IVR system to call them all to meet together. Also, when Jack was off trying to find the specialist who knew of Locke’s past spinal condition, he could’ve just used the hospital’s IVR system to track the specialist down.

Just another random thought on how IVR could be used in Lost as we continue to wind down to the season finale.

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IVR Terminology

May 2, 2011

Just like any technology space, the Telco and IVR world have their fair share of industry specific terms and acronyms. Thus, Plum has developed an IVR glossary to help make sense of all the telephony nomenclature.  Here is a link to our glossary of terms: http://www.plumvoice.com/glossary

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IVR and Movies

March 30, 2011

As summer gets closer, I thought, “Great! Pretty soon we’ll start getting all the cool movies.” Some of those movies include: Iron Man 2, Robin Hood, Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time, and The A-Team. Can’t wait to see them.

However, I also thought: “When do these movies come out again?”

To fix this problem, I believe that IVR can be used to make outbound calls to people to remind them about these summer blockbuster movies. In the same way that commericials are used for advertising movies, you could set up an IVR application with a message that states, “Hey! Just wanted to let you know that Iron Man 2 comes out this weekend and you sure don’t want to miss it. Buy your tickets in advance to avoid the long movie lines.”

Hey! That’s another idea.

IVR can be used for having people call in and buy their tickets in advance. The IVR application could even allow for users to pay by credit card for their tickets.

Just some ideas on how IVR can improve the lives of us movie-watchers.

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