Company Story

Pennsylvania Paper & Supply is a facility management, industrial packaging, equipment and supplies wholesaler in Scranton, PA. For over 100 years, the privately owned company has been supplying paper goods, janitorial/ sanitation equipment and supplies, industrial packaging equipment and supplies, safety supplies, etc. Pennsylvania Paper & Supply is part of Envoy Solutions Company and employs over 300 employees, with many of those being remote. 

Challenge

Over 250 PPS employees work in the field and rely on an IVR solution for time and task reporting. PPS’s legacy voice application tracked attendance and calculated employee time spent on a worksite. Employees simply called an IVR system to clock in and out of their assigned job locations.

This legacy IVR system faced three major issues: 

1. Lack of System Support - The existing vendor no longer supports the current system. The lack of a viable vendor and support pushed PPS to find a new IVR system. 
2. Reliability - President of PPS, Douglas Fink, wanted something more reliable than their legacy solution. The legacy system went down several times each year, forcing the company to manually process employee information, which is very laborious and frustrating.
3. Functionality & Scalability - Fink also wanted increased functionality for the flexibility to build the system for future needs. Scalability was also essential to meet demand swings placed upon the IVR system.

When researching new IVR vendors, Plum Voice checked all these boxes. Whereas the legacy system was a “one trick pony,” Plum Voice’s tools and platform supported multiple audio voices and languages. When comparing all vendors, Plum Voice provided the best features and price, giving the company a new level of flexibility that Fink sought to bring to his company’s operations.

Solution

In the fall of 2011, PPS opted for the Plum Voice iOn on-premises system. Getting the local Plum Voice server up and running was “relatively painless and simple to do,” according to Fink. 

The IT team at PPS built their application using Plum Voice’s VoiceXML tool, Plum DEV. Fink said the comparison between their legacy system and the new IVR systems built with Plum DEV “...light years beyond. [The Plum solution has] way more robust functionality and is feature-rich, so there’s much more we can do.” 

The system created a better experience for PPS employees. The improvement with the natural voice audio was significant and much easier for employees to understand. “It was like night and day,” Fink said. Employees could work through the remote workforce time reporting faster for better efficiency.

Plum Voice also answered Fink’s need for a reliable IVR system, “[Our IVR has] become such a mission-critical part of our operation that the increased reliability made a huge difference for us.”