Payment Service Network Manages Company Growth and Handles 400% Call Volume Increase with Plum Voice

Payment Service Network (PSN) helps companies to streamline their payment services by offering multichannel remittance options, including over the phone, through the company’s web portal, a mobile app, and more. The company offers innovative payment services that significantly reduce the cost of processing transactions, and makes communication with customers easy to set up and manage. PSN serves, municipalities, utility companies, property management firms, and other businesses with recurring billing needs.

In 2005, PSN was growing, and growing fast. While that may seem more like a cause for celebration than a cause for concern, it put the company at a crossroads. The options on the table were to hire additional agents to field customer payment calls, or to implement an interactive voice response (IVR) system to automate the payment process.

PSN president and CTO, Norman Ehiorobo knew that the costs associated with hiring additional agents would inhibit the company’s growth trajectory. For a company that prided itself on making finances more efficient the right choice was clear. Therefore, Ehiorobo turned his attention to finding an IVR solution for PSN.

Ehiorobo began researching IVR companies and Plum Voice stood out among the competition because Plum allowed users to test out their products before committing to them. The Plum DEV platform won over Ehiorobo thanks to this try-it-before-you-buy-it access and Plum’s favorable pricing.

As a developer in his own right, Ehiorobo built PSN’s IVR application. “The programming wasn’t complex and there’s enough information available that we’ve been able to self-help. Support is helpful when we use it, but we don’t typically need it,” he said. The result was an IVR application that allowed payers to call in and, because Plum is a PCI-DSS (Level 1) complaint platform, easily make secure payments over the phone.

The first time a customer calls the automatic payments number, the application prompts them to set up an account so future calls made from the same phone number are automatically recognized and associated with the correct account. This helps to make subsequent calls much faster.