Plum Voice Blog

Customers Don’t Like Hidden Fees A recent Gizmodo article highlighted the fact that some telecom companies charge customers high fees for paying their bills over the phone with a representative. Depending on the company, these fees ranged from $5 to $8 per transaction. With the large customer bases these companies have, those fees could result in millions of dollars in extra… Read More

In a past post, we discussed the technological and the financial challenges that go hand-in-hand with developing natural language processing (NLP) applications. While these challenges remain relevant, more recent developments mean it’s easier and less expensive to incorporate natural language processing into your voice channels. Thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), companies can manage NLP apps more easily and for far… Read More

Expectations are a funny thing. In this space, we talk a lot about customer experiences because expectations often play a big role in that area. Some industries are known for atrocious customer service. These negative experiences have created an expectation of poor service from providers in that industry. These views can be so entrenched that when a customer has a… Read More

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the hottest things in the tech world these days. But, as is often the case, the hype around AI can result in misinformation and confusion. When investing in a powerful technology like AI, you want to ensure that you know exactly what you’re getting and how you’re going to use it. Here are five… Read More

  When it comes to development philosophy, businesses have a lot of different choices. And yet, it seems that no matter what a company chooses to do, development often comes down to building it yourself or paying someone else to do it. As a company that offers development platforms, we see all kinds of development scenarios. Based on our years… Read More

Automation has a lot of benefits, like faster, more efficient customer service, increasing customer satisfaction, and improving customer experiences. It can also save companies a lot of money. For some companies ‘a lot’ of money is A LOT. See how one of Plum’s clients used IVR to take cost savings to new heights, and reaped additional benefits along the way…. Read More

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is pretty cool technology. Simply say something and a machine will do what you ask it to do. Usually. When an ASR grammar is tuned properly and the call conditions are good, ASR works really well. Unpacking that last sentence should help you understand a bit more about ASR, how it works, and how to recognize… Read More

The Cost of Poor Call Containment For folks in the IVR world, the goal is to keep as many calls contained in the IVR as possible. This is known the as call containment or the automation rate. The higher the percentage of calls contained in the IVR the fewer calls agents have to field. Unfortunately, legacy IVRs don’t do well… Read More

How AI Delivers Better IVR When you hear artificial intelligence (AI) and interactive voice response (IVR) in the same breath you may scratch your head and wonder, “how does that work?” Using an AI engine, like IBM’s Watson, with an IVR system creates smarter self-service applications and delivers better customer experiences. With IVR callers have two different ways to input… Read More

A Place for AI When most people hear Artificial Intelligence, they tend to think in terms of Hollywood and famous AI characters like HAL9000 and Skynet. Business applications of AI are nowhere near that sexy, but, on the bright side, that also means that our robotic overlords aren’t looming on the horizon just yet. The reality of AI at this… Read More