Case Study: How to Use IVR as a Hub for All Your Voice-Based Customer Service Needs

There’s something to be said for organization, and the more pieces that are in play the greater need to keep everything orderly. When we’re talking about managing high volume phone calls interactive voice response is the manna for your trek through the desert.

One of the great things about using an IVR to centralize incoming calls is that it doesn’t matter how many agents you have or where they are–in-house, outsourced, or whatever it may be. One of Plum’s customers is a major financial services company. Let’s call them Major Financial Services Company (MFSC) in order to preserve their anonymity for this exercise.

Well MFSC has a national reach and they needed a way to efficiently support all of their various, customizable products. So no matter what product someone bought, regardless of where they were in the country, that person could call up MFSC and get service that catered specifically to the product(s) they purchased.

The company had an IVR before switching to Plum, but didn’t use it to its fullest capacity. Because of the massive size of MFSC’s operation, the company uses a number of out-sourced call centers across the country. Here’s where things get really cool.

Armed with the Plum platform, MFSC built multiple applications using the VoiceXML language and tailored each to meet the needs specific products. By linking the Plum platform to their customer CRM (thanks APIs!), as soon as the IVR picks up the call, which is instantaneous–every time–the application deduces who is calling and intelligently routes their call to the appropriate support center.

All of this occurs in real time. This approach ensures that the agents who are best equipped to help a given customer get those calls, based on their availability. Not only did this scheme help customers get the information they needed more quickly, but it also helped MFSC to measure and normalize their expectations for their call centers.

Of course, it helps that MFSC is a proactive company, not simply content to sit on its laurels. No. The company uses data provided by VoiceTrends to continuously update and optimize its applications to continue to provide the best possible experience for customers.

The result of these efforts from MFSC, among other things, is an extremely high call containment rate, which generally sits at 85% or higher.

Grab the full case study, which goes into greater detail, to learn more about how MFSC accomplished all of this and the benefits they derived from the Plum platform.