The resident team of development engineers here at Plum is constantly and consistently working to enhance existing services and features by introducing new technology and integrating new feature enhancements. This is often times not an easy task, as many of our IVR systems operate on an enterprise level and require highly-functioning software and hardware.
IVR enhancement and integration is one of Plum’s primary goals, as we strive to be on the cutting edge of technological development, giving our clients and customers access to the latest and greatest system offerings.
Plum’s enterprise-level IVR products can boast several improvements this year, including a newly integrated feature that allows from transcription of open-ended questions. Data collectors were previously listening to a recording multiple times in an attempt to accurately discern a respondent’s answer. With this newly integrated transcription capability, speech interpretation is now done internally, even on open-ended questions, and clients are provided with previously transcribed documents that they can go on to integrate with their other data findings.
In addition Plum’s IVR products now offer advanced question verification and randomized questions and answers capabilities. This allows our survey respondents to review, modify, and control the data they submit (in order to ensure 100% accuracy) while simultaneously giving our clients the most accurate data results possible. These features went far to streamline the data collection process for both the respondents and those collecting the data.
One of our most notable achievements is the heightened integration we have achieved between our IVR products and various social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Social media is becoming increasingly vital to our clients business operations, regardless of what field they are in. We thought it was of pinnacle importance to ensure that our products seamlessly integrate with social networking sites in a functional way that will be of use to our clients, so we focused our efforts on developing an API that would allow us to do so.
Social media was a huge developmental focus for us this year, as it was for the tech community at large. Some of the biggest stories and developments in the tech industry come from the use and development of both new and existing social networks.
Protests movements have swept the globe in the last year, and one of the most effective communication mediums for protestors was social media. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were in full use during the Occupy and Arab spring protests, and disseminated the information, both ideological and event related, about the movement. Social networks acted as a forum through which movements could gain grassroots support and inform and update interested parties about their actions and whereabouts. And it was all done for free.
Additionally, Facebook and their partners began engaging in “frictionless” sharing. This basically means that companies partnered with Facebook will have access to user data (like the content they choose to click on). Companies who engage in frictionless Facebook sharing will be able to target their advertising at a higher level and capitalize on their promotional budget by maximizing ad effectiveness,
At the end of June 2011, Google launched Google+, intended to act as direct competition to Facebook, in order to allow Google users to have access to social networking capabilities via their Google interface. Google+ is considered by many to rival Facebook, and it was announced yesterday that the user base has surpassed 62 million, adding 625,000 users a day. In addition, the sites membership may total 400 million members by the end of 2012.
