Many of Plum’s customers and prospects look to us to replace their existing IVR solutions.  Whether a company is replacing legacy technology or looking to move to a more reliable platform, there is one common business issue that remains consistent in their pursuit for a new IVR system or hosting service: portability.

Many businesses spend tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to implement IVR to automate phone calls in order to save money.  However, the ROI case for IVR diminishes if a vendor charges a fortune to make changes to the application after it’s deployed. Also, if the platform is not stable, reliable or scalable, calls will either not be processed correctly or transferred to a live operator.  This is where VoiceXML comes in.  VoiceXML is the web’s open standard programming language for IVR and using it to build voice applications is kind of an insurance policy for companies.  If your IVR is developed in VoiceXML and you’re not happy with your vendor, you can port your code to another vendor that supports the programming language.  If you want to make changes to the application, any web developer can assess the VoiceXML specification and change the call flow without recourse to the company that development the call flow.