CASE STUDY

Healthcare Company Simplifies IVR Testing and Accelerates Development with Plum Fuse

COMPANY
Major Healthcare Payment Processing Company (MHPPC) offers medical providers and patients a one-stop solution for all of their billing and payment collection needs.

INDUSTRY
Healthcare

PRODUCT
Plum Fuse

APPLICATION
Payments

Executive Summary

A Major Healthcare Payment Processing Company needed an easy to manage IVR solution. The company switched from a legacy system to Plum’s Fuse platform, which allowed it to deploy a new IVR application in a matter of weeks, providing the desired features while simultaneously reducing testing and maintenance time.

The Problem

MHPPC had previous experience with IVR solutions. The company’s legacy system was code-based, the complexity of which made it challenging to add features and difficult to test. On a related note, as the company developed the application and the telephony elements became increasingly intricate, maintenance on the app became “very painful,” according to MHPPC’s Vice President of Product Development.

It was a gradual decision, but in late 2011, MHPPC started to investigate new IVR vendors. The company wanted to increase the functionality of its application and felt that that required a new solution. MHPPC gave serious consideration to four or five different IVR vendors before deciding to go with Plum Fuse.

Fuse’s key selling point was its interface, “Plum’s UI made all the difference for us,” said the VP of Product Development, “by being able to drag and drop the application.” This enabled MHPPC to easily build out their IVR application with new features. MHPPC also appreciated the fact that Plum had its own technology and didn’t simply white label someone else’s. Plum’s competitive pricing factored into the decision as well.

The Solution

Getting started with the Fuse platform was very easy for MHPPC. The team there got an application built, tested, and pushed into production in a matter of weeks. That ease of use, abetted by the platform’s UI, is “the number one thing you have going for you, by far,” MHPPC told Plum.

Testing, which was the bane of the company’s legacy IVR solution, became much easier. Fuse’s built-in cloning feature meant that MHPPC could have multiple versions of its application. By connecting a cloned version of the app to a different phone number it became easy to test new features before pushing them into the production version. This gave the MHPPC development team a considerable confidence boost when testing new features.

iconQuote

“If you don’t have developer resources, but want to build an IVR application Plum Fuse is something that a savvy business analyst could do. You don’t need telephony engineers to get it going.”

MHPPC Vice President of Product Development

The Results

Considerable time savings stand as the most significant outcome of MHPPC’s switch to the Fuse platform. When it comes to IVR, MHPPC values reliability. This means not having to do constant maintenance, and only updating the application when changes need to be made. That has been their experience using Plum. Plus, when changes are necessary, like new sets of menus or conditions, Fuse allows the MHPPC team to implement them significantly faster than the old solution.

MHPPC also highlighted Plum’s customer service, noting very fast response times on support tickets. The company uses over 100 phone numbers, and when it needs to add more numbers the Plum team turns around those requests quickly and on a consistent basis.

Overall, MHPPC noted that Fuse provides “a good service with a really good design tool” that has “significantly reduced our time for development and maintenance.”