Michigan Basic Property Insurance (MBPIA) said that it has deployed Plum IVR to optimize customer service transactions.

 

Plum Voice is a single-source provider of carrier-class interactive voice response (IVR) solutions. The company’s solution was selected due to its professional services team that brought the technical and functional expertise that MBPIA required for its IVR project.

 

Plum officials said the selection of Plum provided MBPIA with a robust VoiceXML (News - Alert) platform that would deliver “unbeatable” call quality and performance and a professional services team.

 

Created by the Michigan State Legislature in 1968, MBPIA provides fair access to property insurance to everyone at standard rates regardless of property location. It serves thousands of customers in the region.

 

Prior to selecting Plum Voice, MBPIA said that it was being inundated daily with large volumes of customer calls that would continually ask for the same sort of information, such as policy coverage dates or claims submission.

 

The implementation of a customer self-service strategy with the help of IVR has enabled cut costs in not only in MBPLA call center, but also in overall operations, said company’s officials.

 

The offloading of repetitive transactions to its IVR system has enabled MBPIA to talk to agents and call center staff out of the. According to officials, this has led to greater customer satisfaction.

 

Plum delivered a multi-functional customer service transaction system that involved an on-site VoiceXML IVR system, and also handles a moderate level of daily call traffic. Officials said that the organization utilized a Siemens (News - Alert) Hicom 300 E PBX system.

 

Also, the Plum on-site system permitted call transfers through standard ISDN or digital gateway takes the submitted form data and presents it to the processing bank. When it receives a response from the bank, it presents that return data to the site of origin for appropriate handling.

 

Working closely with MBPIA’s IT staff, Plum’s team of service professionals developed a detailed requirements about how the IVR system would handle each type of request.

 

Officials said the result was a multifunctional IVR system that would handle a moderate call volume and satisfy a variety of requests and transactions, including claim status information, policy coverage questions, billing questions and more.