What is DND number?

Few people enjoy receiving calls or text messages they didn’t request from businesses, especially if they’ve registered on their country’s Do Not Disturb (DND) list. In India, that list is officially called the National Do Not Call (NDNC) Registry. Individuals who do not wish to receive promotional texts or calls from businesses that they have no relationship with can sign up for free. Then, if a business tries sending someone promotional messages they don’t want, consumers can file complaints that have serious consequences for the businesses that are in violation.

How to Sign Up for the DND List in India?

The easiest way to get on the DND list is to send an SMS message to 1909, the national number reserved for the purpose. The body of the message should be simply START DND or START 0.

The subscriber’s carrier should instantly acknowledge the request and warn that it may take some time for the registration to become effective. The registry provides a page consumers can visit to check registration status.

If an individual doesn’t get a confirmation text, or simply prefers voice calls to texting, they can also call 1909 and follow the recorded instructions to register.

To remove a number from the registry, send STOP DND to 1909. However, numbers cannot be deactivated for 90 days after activation.

Customizing DND Preferences in India

By the way, while most people block all unsolicited commercial communications (UCC), consumers can pick and choose which industries to block. There are seven sectors (see below). Text START n, where n is the digit, associated with the sector, to block promotional messages from each industry.

1. Banking, insurance, financial products, and credit cards
2. Real estate
3. Education
4. Health
5. Consumer goods and automobiles
6. Communication, broadcasting, entertainment, and IT
7. Tourism and leisure

People can change DND preferences at any time, but after someone makes one change, they won’t be able to make another for 30 days.

What to Do When DND Doesn’t Help: Report Spam Calls in India

The NDNC Registry is a great resource, but it’s not perfect. If a telemarketer illegally ignores the DND list, consumers may receive messages they don’t want. This happens far too frequently — according to LocalCircles, two out of three people whose numbers are in the registry get three or more unwanted calls every day. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has taken many steps to combat these unwanted communications. Most recently, new rules went into effect on May 1 that require telecom companies to use AI spam filters in their call and SMS services.

Still, knowing spam happens, the TRAI set up a way to file spam complaints.

How to Report Spam Calls in India Using the 1909 Number

As with registration, the trick is to text or call 1909. Provide all the particulars of the unwanted message:

• Sender ID
• Message content
• Message date and time

Alternatively, recipients can search their carrier’s website for a form on which to make a DND complaint.

Consumers who submit a complaint should receive a unique complaint tracking number. The NDNC Registry should follow up by reporting to filers the action it takes within seven days. Actions may include having the calling number disconnected and forcing the originator to pay financial penalties.

How to Avoid DND Violations as a Business in India?

As a business, it behooves you not to be the source of DND complaints. Several best practices will keep you on the side of the angels.

• Register with the TRAI and obtain a unique sender ID to use in your messages.
• Gain consent from recipients before sending any marketing or promotional messages. Consent can be explicit (given directly by the customer) or inferred (derived from an existing business relationship or transaction); for promotional messages, get explicit consent.
• Check each recipient against the NDNC, and respect people’s preferences.
• Provide an opt-out mechanism, such as an unsubscribe link or instructions to send a “STOP” message, with each promotional message.
• Respect time restrictions — don’t send promotional messages after 9 p.m. or before 9 a.m. Also, don’t send more than six messages per hour with the same content, from the same sender, to the same number.
• Keep records of customer consent, preferences, and opt-out requests, as mandated by the TRAI.

Do all of that and you should be fine. If you run into trouble, the experts on Plivo’s support team stand ready to help.

Plivo’s CTO Michael Ricordeau writes …

I’ve been exploring AI and wanted to test a few things on my own because that’s what I enjoy doing as CTO at Plivo. I wanted to learn about OpenAI tools and build something useful for the company at the same time. The result was our new /askplivo chatbot for Slack.

We have a lot of resources on our website, including API documentation, blog posts, and use case guides. It can be challenging for our employees to navigate through them and find what they want.

Occasionally, I would see questions popping up on our Slack channels about a feature, or telecom regulations (I’m looking at you, 10DLC), or country coverage. If we could have a Q&A chatbot assistant capable of answering questions instead of waiting (desperately, sometimes) for a co-worker to reply we could be more productive.

For instance, imagine you’re a Plivo support engineer and a customer is asking whether Plivo supports SMS in France. (I use France as an example because that’s where I’m from, but you can use any other country; we support more than 190.) With a chatbot, you could get an answer in less than a minute.

Because my goal was to learn more about AI and OpenAI, I started exploring how I could build a chatbot that used Plivo’s content enhanced with the power of AI. I wanted something that would be smart enough to answer with relevant information and not hallucinate, which is a well-known problem.

Designing the AI chatbot

I like Python for prototyping and MVP because the syntax is simple, and I’ve been using it for 20 years. Granted, it’s not super performant, but I’m not planning to build the next Google here. I wanted a lightweight web framework, so I used Flask to expose the API to interact with Slack and RQ to process jobs in the background.

For AI, I found LangChain, a Python (and TypeScript) framework that abstracts many of the LLM and indexing parts. It’s well-integrated with the OpenAI API.

To store, index, and query (search) the data, I wanted to use a vector database. I had many challenges choosing one: I tried RedisSearch and FAISS but ended up using Qdrant; the cloud version offers a free tier that was good enough for my use case, and it’s written in Rust, so it’s memory-efficient.

Finally, I picked Fly to host the software. I wanted to test Fly because it’s cheap and easy to deploy and scale with a Dockerfile, and I didn’t want to use Heroku anymore.

Here’s how everything fits together:

Technical details and pain points

Building the application was both fun and a learning experience.

I had high hopes for using FAISS, but it’s not compatible between x86_64 and arm64 architectures, so if, like me, you’re developing on an arm64-based Apple M1/M2, you cannot build your FAISS index file and upload it to your x86_64 server — and the Fly hosting platform doesn’t support arm64. I turned instead to Qdrant.

To feed the data in the Qdrant vector database, I took the Plivo website sitemap.xml file, scraped all of the URLs, extracted the content, and transformed it into LLM embeddings, then inserted it in Qdrant. If you do this, be warned that OpenAI will bill you for the embeddings.

Next, I loaded the documents. LangChain, by default, tries to load all documents in memory, so I got quite a lot of OOM killer in my Fly instance. I didn’t want to triple the memory usage (and my bill), so I built a data importer to process documents in chunks instead of loading everything in one shot. Also, LangChain has no GitHub data importer, so I wrote one.

At this point, I had the resources I needed for the chatbot hosted on Fly. I should note that while most of the tools I used are lightweight and fast enough for our use case, OpenAI can be a bottleneck. If you use the GPT-4 model, response time can take up to two minutes, depending on the complexity of your question. I had to change the API timeout for the OpenAI Python SDK to 180 seconds.

Once I had the back end set up, the next step was to create the Slack bot app from the Slack admin console. I’ve documented the process of configuring and deploying the application in the README page of the project’s GitHub repository.

Why don’t we consult the oracle?

After a few hours of development time, I had a working chatbot. Here’s what using it looks like.

Et voilà!

Want to develop something like the /askplivo bot? Check out my code — it’s open source, so feel free to use it and fork it. You’ll find there’s room for improvement and a few challenges to overcome:

• The search query is optimized for text. Most of the time, it won’t use the GitHub indexed code; I need to dig into that.
• It occasionally hallucinates responses — making up a 10DLC API resource, for instance. I’m planning to experiment with Anchor GPT to fix that.
• If you add new documents, you have to re-index all documents from scratch, which is slow and costly.
• There is no chat session concept — each question/response is always unrelated to the previous ones. I’m not sure we need this feature.

If you use the code, and especially if you enhance it in a way it can benefit others, feel free to contribute and send a PR.

Leadership Talk: The Modern State of Customer Support

The customer service industry has undergone a revolution these last few years—teams have embraced remote and hybrid operations as standard, and sophisticated contact center technology has enabled businesses to push beyond the established limits of customer support.

We sat down with Renu Yadav, the head of customer support of the #1-rated cloud communications platform on the market, for a candid discussion about the modern state of customer support and the evolution of technology trends within the industry.​

Contacto: How has the landscape of the Customer Support industry evolved in the past few years, and what key factors were most impactful?

Renu: Significantly.

Ten years ago, phone support was the only option because businesses just wanted to have people that customers can talk to. Now there are so many choices that if a business makes it hard to get help, customers will take their business elsewhere.

Support is not limited to just phone or email support. Customers are now using multiple channels to interact with businesses, including live chat, and social media. Social media is no longer just a marketing platform, it has become a major channel for customers to interact with businesses.

There is also a need to have a global approach to support, and they need to be able to provide support in multiple languages and time zones.

AI and automation are being used to automate tasks, such as answering FAQs and answering routine questions. This frees up support agents to focus on resolving more complex issues.

There is a shift from transactional, reactive support to proactive, personalized, and experience-driven support. It is no longer seen as a cost center, but rather as an opportunity to differentiate from competitors and build customer loyalty.

Support is moving to a strategic department, capable of driving improvements across the business.

What are the biggest challenges that Customer Support reps face today, and how can they be overcome?

Renu: The responsibilities of a support agent look very different compared to a few years ago. Support teams are not required to just follow processes and perform routine tasks. Those can be achieved via automation. They need to come up with customized and tailored solutions to resolve issues faster.

• Keeping up with product changes: Companies and products are rapidly innovating and updating their offerings. Support agents need to stay current with the latest product features and changes. Regular product training, refreshers, and product assessments can help support teams stay updated with product changes. At Plivo, we also review ticket trends to plan out refreshers on a biweekly basis.
• Meeting rising customer expectations: Today’s customers expect fast, personalized support. Customers value getting their issues resolved in their first interaction with the support team. However, this can be a challenge if the issue is complex or if the representative doesn’t have the right information or authority to resolve it. To address this, companies can empower their representatives with the right resources, enable them with decision-making tools, and streamline their escalation processes. Cultivating a customer-centric culture across the organization can help align all departments toward meeting and exceeding customer expectations.
• Working remotely: While remote work has impacted everyone, the impact is more on teams that need to work in groups. It was way easier to train, identify ticket trends, outages, coordinate with other stakeholders, manage escalations, and even get help on any issues in real-time. The shift to remote work has brought new challenges for customer support representatives, such as isolation, burnout, and communication difficulties. This can be mitigated by promoting a strong remote work culture, encouraging regular communication and team-building activities like off-work catchups so that the teams get to build a rapport and not all discussions are work-related.

Overcoming these challenges often requires a combined approach of people, process, and technology.

In your opinion, what are the most important qualities or skills that a customer support rep should possess to excel in their role?

Renu: That’s a great question, one that when I am interviewing candidates for my team I always like to ask. From my perspective, the most important skills vary by customer and situation:

• Resilience, empathy, and patience: Dealing with customer complaints and issues can be stressful, and not every interaction is positive. Resilience and the ability to handle stress are key to maintaining a positive attitude and a high level of service. So is the ability to understand and share the feelings of customers. Customers often reach out when they are frustrated or upset, and an empathetic response can help calm them down and assure them that their concerns are being taken seriously.
• Time management skills: Unlike other teams, Support work is not project/timeline based. It’s the number of calls/tickets they can handle in a day. This number is not stable and keeps changing on a day-to-day basis. They need to be able to prioritize and juggle multiple tasks at the same time. So time management is a crucial skill.
• Business communication: Representatives need the ability to explain complex solutions in simple terms, as well as deep attention to detail to ensure they don’t miss any critical points while debugging an issue.
• Teamwork: Support is often a team effort, and representatives need to work well with their colleagues to solve customer issues, share knowledge, and improve service processes.
• Problem-solving & decision-making skills: Support teams also need to be able to think critically and come up with effective solutions to customer problems. This is becoming more and more critical in today’s fast-paced world. Agents are expected to be quick on their feet and able to come up with innovative solutions.

With that said, how can the right tool elevate a customer support representative’s ability to properly address a customer’s needs?

Renu: Without the right tool, a support rep would have to do way more work than necessary. In the right hands, an effective tool can:

• Streamline routine tasks: Things such as ticket assignment to representatives, tracking the status of tickets, and adding options to have views on which tickets need to be prioritized. This frees up representatives’ time so that they can focus on resolving issues.
• Provide a comprehensive view of the customer: Tools that integrate with various channels and systems can provide a comprehensive view of the customer. This includes the customer’s history, preferences, and previous interactions. This information can help representatives provide personalized and informed support.
• Collect feedback from customers: Tools that allow customers to provide feedback can help organizations understand how their customers are experiencing their support. This feedback can be used to improve the support process and make it more customer-centric.
• Provide a knowledge base or FAQ section: An detailed knowledge base or FAQ section can help customers find answers to their questions without having to contact a support representative.
• Enable collaboration and escalation: Tools should also enable collaboration and escalation. This can help ensure that issues are escalated to the appropriate people when necessary.
• Offer in-depth reporting and analytics: A support tool should not only be able to generate basic reports but also have the ability to create custom reports that can help organizations analyze customer interactions and identify trends. This data can be used in so many powerful ways.

With the rise of self-service options and automation, how do you see the role of Customer Support representatives evolving in the near and distant future?

Renu: It will have both positive and negative impacts, right?

The size of the teams will become smaller and smaller. AI and automation will be expected to handle routing queries. So the agents will be required to work on complex problems that require a human touch.

At the same time, the work is becoming more challenging so the focus going forward will be on the quality of teams and not the size of the teams.

Support is evolving from transactional to consultative support, from handling simple issues to resolving complex problems, and from being order takers to being customer advocates. They are now expected to be product experts who can help customers solve problems and help differentiate between competition.

Representatives are now tasked with resolving more complex issues which require them to think critically and creatively to solve problems. The insights gained from support interactions with customers influence product development, marketing, and other areas of the business.

These changes will free representatives from routine tasks and enable them to focus on the complex, challenging aspects of customer support that require a human touch but this also means that support agents will need to be committed to continual learning and adaptation.

So the overall contributions of the support teams will become increasingly valuable.

How do you think the increasing importance of customer experience and satisfaction has shaped the Customer Support industry, and what steps should companies take to prioritize these areas?

Renu: From a business perspective, it is not just important to get a customer on contract, it is more critical to retain the customer. That is where customer experience and satisfaction play a huge role. Companies can use customer support to differentiate themselves in a crowded market, and foster customer loyalty, and positive word-of-mouth.

Any company looking to prioritize customer experience and satisfaction within their business should:

• Understand customer expectations: Regularly survey customers, monitor feedback, and stay abreast of market trends to understand what customers expect from their support experience.
• Implement the right technology: Leverage technology to automate routine tasks, provide omnichannel support, personalize customer interactions, and gain insights from customer data.
• Measure the right metrics: Look beyond traditional efficiency metrics (like average handle time) and measure metrics that reflect the quality of the customer experience, such as Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and Customer Effort Score (CES).
• Foster a customer-centric culture: Make customer satisfaction a company-wide goal. All departments, not just customer support, should understand their role in contributing to the customer experience.
• Review and improve: Regularly review your customer support operations and use customer feedback and data to identify areas for improvement. This process of continuous improvement is crucial in maintaining a high-quality customer experience.

With more options available to customers than ever before, how have customer expectations changed over the past few years?

Renu: Customers today expect businesses to provide instant, 24/7, multi-channel support with self-service options and transparency.

• Customers expect more convenience: Customers today are accustomed to getting what they want when they want it, and how they want it. This means that businesses need to offer convenient customer support options, such as 24/7 support, live chat, and self-service options.
• Customers expect more personalization: Customers today expect a personalized experience, and this is no different in customer support. Businesses are using data and analytics to personalize their customer support interactions, tailoring them to the individual customer’s needs and preferences. This can help to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Customers expect more transparency: Customers today want to be kept informed about the status of their issue and what is being done to resolve it. Businesses need to be transparent with their customers and communicate with them throughout the customer support process.
• Customers expect more empathy: Customers today want to feel like they are being heard and understood. Businesses need to be empathetic to their customers and understand their frustration. This will help to build trust and rapport with customers.
• Customers expect more speed: Customers today expect their issues to be resolved quickly. Businesses need to be responsive and resolve customer issues as quickly as possible.

Can you share any insight on the use of data and analytics in customer support? How can data-driven approaches enhance the overall customer experience?

Renu: Data is huge right now. And I am not talking about customer data. I am talking about issue data and ticket data. If used the right way, there is so much key information to be pulled:

• What kind of issues do we receive on a daily, weekly, monthly basis?
• What product are we facing the most issues on?
• Are there any enhancements required in the product?
• Which support channel do customers find most convenient?
• To track escalations.
• To find which customers are raising the most queries.
• What are our response and resolution times?
• What training do we need to create for our teams?
• How satisfied are our customers?

By using data, support can move from a reactive function to a strategic one, capable of driving improvements across the business.

What channels do you personally find to be the most effective for resolving the support needs of your customers?

Renu: The effectiveness of different customer support channels depends on the nature of the customer’s issue and the customer’s preferences. Phone support is not a great tool for customers if they need to be put on hold for a long time. On the other hand, though, email support won’t necessarily be the best tool for customers who have an urgent issue that needs to be looked into immediately.

In my opinion, using a combination of tools can ensure that businesses are able to provide support that meets the needs of all of their customers.

Self-service options are a great way to reduce the number of queries coming to support agents and allow them to focus on more complex problems. I also think that it is important to build an extensive FAQ section so that customers can easily find answers to common questions.

I also think that chatbots and AI can be valuable tools for customer support. They can provide instant, 24/7 support for simple inquiries or issues, and they can also gather initial information before escalating more complex issues to human agents.

I have one final question for you before I let you go. If you had one feature on your customer support tool wishlist, what would that be and why?

Renu: It would be the ability to integrate with other tools and systems. This would allow customer support representatives to have a single view of the customer, which would make it easier to resolve issues and provide better support.

For example, if a customer has a problem with their order, the customer support representative could see the customer’s order history, shipping information, and payment information. This would allow the representative to quickly identify the issue and resolve it.

The ability to create custom reports is a close second. It is not enough to only work on issues and meet KPIs. It is also essential to find trends and patterns. This can help in so many ways, such as improving product offerings, streamlining processes, reducing response and resolution times, collaborating with internal teams, and so on.

Thank you for taking the time to chat with us—it sounds like you and your team are doing some amazing things at Plivo with the tools available to you. I look forward to speaking with you again soon!

Renu: Of course, my pleasure!

The movie “Field of Dreams” made popular the saying “If you build it, they will come.” Sadly, for ecommerce businesses, just building it won’t bring in customers, no matter how strong your SEO mojo is. If you want to sell stuff you have to go tell people about what you sell — and that’s called marketing.

SMS marketing in particular involves sending promotional materials via text message — in contrast to transactional messaging, which encompasses things like delivery updates and one-time passwords.

SMS is the best communication channel for marketing. It’s highly available — consider how many people have cellphones and how high open rates are for text messages. It doesn’t require anyone to download a mobile app. And according to research by SAP SE, “70% of respondents say that SMS is a good way for a company to get their attention and 64% say that organizations should use SMS-based engagement more often.”

Build your subscriber base

Having said that, however, you can’t just buy a list of phone numbers and send unsolicited text messages to individuals with whom you have no business relationship. You must gather opt-in consent from message recipients first. Once you have that consent, you can add the contact information to your subscriber list.

How do you gain subscribers? Offer customers and potential customers incentives to be contacted. Typical incentives include cost savings, time savings (such as faster shipments), and early access to information, such as insider priority for sales.

Here are six ways to gather opt-in consent.

• Put a signup box on your product pages.
• Let customers tick a box to opt in to messaging when they first provide their phone numbers as part of their purchase information.
• Display an exit intent popup when someone’s about to leave your site, asking for consent.
• Offer a link to the subscriber signup page in email newsletters.
• Give people a short code they can use to subscribe by texting a keyword.
• Promote signups in social media campaigns.

Whatever methods you use, make it clear that you’re asking consumers to consent to receive marketing messages via SMS. Provide a link to your terms and conditions page, and let people know how they can unsubscribe from your list should they choose to in the future. Keep a record of their agreement in case you need to provide it for audit purposes.

7 types of SMS marketing offers

Marketing isn’t simply telling potential customers why they should buy your product, although you can certainly do that. Here are seven SMS marketing tips to help your ecommerce business boost revenue.

• Promotion alerts: Tell consumers about sales and new product launches. With this and other SMS marketing tactics, be sure to include a link to a web page that recipients can click on to see the deal and, hopefully, spend money on it.
• Exclusive deals: Create a loyalty program that includes an SMS promotions list and offer subscribers deals that they can’t get elsewhere. Send customers updates on their loyalty points and information about how to earn more.
• Personalized recommendations: If you have the ability, use customer data to create personalized recommendations for products or services that customers might like given the fact that they’ve already bought some other service. Think Amazon’s “You might also like” recommendations, but delivered directly to customers’ mobile devices.
• Abandoned cart reminders: Remind customers of items they left in their shopping cart, and consider offering a discount if they complete the purchase.
• Review requests: Ask for positive reviews on relevant websites, such as Amazon, Google, and Yelp, as well as whatever review sites are popular with customers in your sector. Positive reviews serve as objective evidence of the value of your product, and asking customers to share their feedback can help foster brand loyalty.
• Replenishment reminders: If you sell products that run out or get used up (such as food, beauty products, or health supplements) send SMS reminders to drive repeat purchases.
• Product tips and guides: Are how-to tips marketing? Arguably — but giving customers information on how best to take advantage of the products they’ve bought can be valuable both to them as consumers and to you as a way to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Winning with SMS marketing

If you like these 13 tips, you might want to download our ebook guide to SMS marketing or look at our getting started guides for bulk messaging. Or you can skip straight to trying Plivo’s SMS API Platform by signing up for free.

If you’ve ever made a call and heard “For English, press or say 1,” you’ve encountered an interactive voice response system. IVR allows callers to access information by speaking a word (thus the “voice” part of the name) or pressing a key on a phone’s Touch-Tone keypad. IVR can serve up prerecorded messages, route calls to specific departments or individuals, or pull data such as bank balances from systems — all without the need to speak to an agent. IVR systems benefit consumers by getting them the information they want quickly, without having to wait on hold.

A good IVR system is particularly useful for financial institutions, as many customer inquiries can be answered without taking up a representative’s time. Typical information for a bank’s IVR menu might include:

• Choice of languages in which to hear the menu
• Directory of departments, including technical support
• Account information, including balance checks
• Automated bill payment
• Appointment booking
• Callback option, if all representatives are busy
• Informational recording on topics such as
• Services offered Business hours Email addresses Website URL Social media handles Directory of branch locations

‍

IVR menu best practices

Whether you’re a bank, mortgage lender, stockbroker, or other financial services professional, following these best practices for IVR systems can help you create a better customer experience.

• Menu options — Don’t overwhelm customers with too many options at each level. Fewer choices make things easier for callers, as they have to remember the ones they’re hearing. Use a maximum of five items at each prompt.
• Special keys — If any keys are reserved for special functions, tell callers about them up-front. For example, “At any time you can press or say 9 to return to the previous menu, or press 0 or say ‘operator’ to speak to an operator.” And that’s another best practice — at every level, give customers an option to speak to a customer service representative.
• Menu order — Put the most popular options first in the IVR system, so callers have to spend less time listening for what they want.
• Option order — Present a task followed by its associated action rather than the other way around, so callers can recognize what they want to do and don’t have to remember “what number was I supposed to press?” For example, “To hear your account balance, press or say or say 1.”
• Accepted input — Allow callers to respond not only via keypress but also via voice. Some customers prefer one way, some the other; give people what they want.
• Pauses — Include a pause of a second or so before giving the choices on a submenu. That allows time for people who have the phone up to their ear to shift it back there after pressing a keypad key.
• Confirm menu level — Start submenus with a short message that confirms the caller has reached the place they intended. For example, “OK, balances. Press or say 1 for your checking account balance; press or say 2 for your savings account.”
• Allow barge-in — Allow callers to select an option at any time — don’t force them to listen to an entire menu before they can make a selection.
• Repeat as necessary — By default, repeat the menu if the caller doesn’t make a selection within a few seconds.

‍

We offer more IVR best practice suggestions in a blog post, including our favorite: Don’t start off by telling callers, “Listen carefully as our menu options have changed.” No one cares.

A sample bank IVR

Every organization is different, so every organization’s IVR menu will be different too. We put this simple two-level menu together to give you some ideas. Undoubtedly your menu will require more levels. Also, there’s no single right way to map out a menu. In this example, we start out asking for a kind of account, but you might prefer to ask for a kind of task first and prompt for the account afterward.

Plan the entire menu tree before you start coding and before you start recording prompts.

Here’s our sample.

Thanks for calling Our Bank. How can we help you? You can press 0 or say “operator” at any time to reach a representative during business hours.

For personal banking services, press or say 1.
For business banking services, press or say 2.
For account inquiries, press or say 3.
For credit card services, press or say 4.
To apply for a new credit card, press or say 5.
For information on your card’s interest rate and other terms and conditions, press or say 6.

1: OK, personal banking.
For account balances and transaction history, press or say 1.
To transfer funds between accounts, press or say 2.
To make a bill payment, press or say 3.
To open a new account, press or say 4.
To report a lost or stolen card, press or say 5.

2: OK, business banking.
For account balances and transaction history, press or say 1.
To transfer funds between accounts, press or say 2.
To make a bill payment, press or say 3.
To open a new account, press or say 4.
For commercial loans and financing, press or say 5.

3: OK, account inquiries.
For account balances and transaction history, press or say 1.
To report a lost or stolen card, press or say 2.
To dispute a transaction, press or say 3.

4: OK, credit cards.
To check your outstanding balance, press or say 1.
To make a payment, press or say 2.
To report a lost or stolen card, press or say 3.
To dispute a transaction, press or say 4.

How to create an IVR system with Plivo

Plivo makes things easy for businesses that want to implement IVR. We’ve written IVR use case guides that show exactly how to create an IVR program in any of seven common web development languages, including annotated code samples.

If you’re not already a Plivo customer, sign up for free today and get started now.

Building truly intelligent voice applications often means grappling with technical limitations such as: 

• Lack of real-time audio access
• Difficulty integrating with AI models
• Limited flexibility for scaling advanced use cases

Plivo’s audio streaming makes this easier. It lets you send real-time call audio to your applications, enabling AI-powered voice agents to respond dynamically. It also comes with features to analyze customer sentiment during calls, and automate tasks like call routing or transfer calls to human agents whenever necessary.In this blog, we’ll explore how audio streaming solves voice infrastructure challenges and help you to deliver next-level customer experiences. Let’s dive in!

How Does Audio Streaming Work?

With audio streaming, businesses transmit the raw media of a live call in real time to their applications or third-party systems.

This illustration shows how a call center might use audio streaming.

Plivo lets you stream audio by using XML instructions or APIs. First, you get a number with Plivo (by signing up on the console), then connect it to an XML application.

Here’s how it works:

XML instructions

With the XML element, you can stream raw media from a live phone call over a WebSocket connection. To begin streaming, return XML like this during the call.

<Response>
<Stream streamTimeout="3600" keepCallAlive="true" bidirectional="true" contentType="audio/x-mulaw;rate=8000" statusCallbackUrl="https://yourdomain.com/callbacks">wss://<yourstream>.ngrok.io/audiostream</Stream>
</Response>

See our XML reference documentation for complete details.

API integration

Alternatively, you can use Plivo APIs to initiate and manage audio streams.

curl -i –user AUTH_ID:AUTH_TOKEN \\
      -H "Content-Type: application/json" \\
      -d '{"service_url": "wss://.ngrok.io/audiostream"}' \\
      https://api.plivo.com/v1/Account/{auth_id}/Call/{call_uuid}/Stream/

See our audio streaming API reference documentation for complete details.

Audio Streaming Use Cases 

Businesses can use audio streaming in multiple ways, especially in tandem with machine learning-based engines and AI voice agents, to enhance value and improve customer experience.

Call centers can leverage Plivo’s audio streaming to extract insights from raw audio data, perform sentiment analysis, implement speech recognition, and analyze voice-related data, enhancing operational efficiency.

You can integrate Plivo’s audio streaming with AI/ML-based tools to provide real-time transcription services.

Similarly, you can integrate audio streams with third-party tools to facilitate live translation of audio content, enabling effective communication across different languages during conferences and meetings.

Here are some key use cases of Plivo audio streaming: 

Smart IVR with dynamic call routing

Core Use Case: Transforming traditional IVR systems into smart, AI-driven IVRs that enable natural language understanding and intelligent call routing.

Example: A telecommunications company implements an AI-Powered IVR where customers can state their concerns naturally (e.g., "I want to upgrade my plan" or "I have a billing issue") instead of navigating menus. 

The system interprets their input, evaluates sentiment, and routes the call to the appropriate team or provides immediate automated assistance, such as sending payment links or resolving common queries. If sentiment analysis detects frustration, the system escalates the call to a specialized agent for de-escalation.

24/7 customer support

Core Use Case: Maintaining consistent customer service quality beyond business hours using AI voice agents.

Example: An e-commerce platform deploys an AI Voice Bot to assist customers during off-hours. If a customer calls at midnight to track a delayed order, the bot retrieves real-time shipping updates from the database, informs the customer, and resolves their issue without human intervention.

Real-time speech recognition, transcription, and analysis

Core Use Case: Transcribing calls in real time by converting spoken language into text for immediate analysis, record-keeping, and automated processing.

Personalized training and real-time coaching for agents

This helps you leverage live call analysis to provide actionable feedback to agents for skill enhancement.

‍Example: During a customer call, the system evaluates the agent's tone and adherence to protocols, offering real-time coaching tips, such as suggesting a more empathetic response or adjusting the script to align with customer sentiment.

Outbound call automation with AI voice agents

Core use case: Automating outbound communication to improve engagement, gather insights, and provide proactive assistance to customers.

Promotional messages

Example: A retail company uses AI voice agents to inform customers about limited-time discounts and exclusive deals, personalizing the message based on purchase history.

Customer feedback surveys

Example: After a service interaction, the system calls customers to collect feedback through a quick, automated survey, ensuring a seamless user experience.

Proactive customer support

Example: An insurance company proactively calls customers to remind them of upcoming policy renewal deadlines, reducing the likelihood of service lapses.

Post-delivery feedback and assistance

Example: After delivering a product, an AI agent contacts customers to confirm satisfaction and offer assistance if issues arise, such as initiating returns or troubleshooting.

Automation of Voice Channel Operations

Core use case: Streamlining routine voice-based interactions to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance customer satisfaction.

Appointment booking

Example: A healthcare provider uses voice agents to schedule, confirm, or reschedule patient appointments via calls, reducing the need for manual coordination.

Service-related queries

Example: A telecom provider deploys voice agents to answer common service queries, such as "How can I change my plan?" or "What’s my current data usage?"

Delivery status updates

Example: A logistics company enables customers to call and inquire about shipment statuses, with the bot providing real-time updates from the system.

Accepting orders on calls

Example: A restaurant uses voice agents to take orders over the phone, confirm details, and provide estimated delivery times without requiring human intervention.

Get Started with Audio Streaming with Plivo 

By integrating audio streaming with AI voice agents, businesses can provide advanced customer support, gain valuable insights into conversations, and improve customer interactions. 

Couple it with speech recognition, AI call analysis and dual channel recording and have a kickass customer support toolkit.

But, to make the most of all these features, you need a CPaaS solution with superior voice infrastructure. Plivo offers superior voice network to launch context-aware voice agents and voice assistants trained on your proprietary knowledge base that transform the customer experience

Here’s why Plivo should be your first choice:

• Superior call quality: Plivo ensures superior call quality through its partnerships with Tier 1 carriers and optimized routing
• Low latency: Global Infrastructure enables low latency communications. Our PoPs are located in seven locations (California, Virginia, Frankfurt, Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, São Paulo) across five continents
• High availability and uptime: With a redundant infrastructure across multiple geographies and at least three local carrier connections across countries, Zentrunk promises 99.99% uptime
• Full redundancy: Redundant links reroute traffic over backup networks in less than two seconds in case of backbone failover 

We can integrate with all top players in the market from STT providers, LLM models and TTS providers. 

The best part? You get started by paying 40% less than all competitors. 

All you have to do is:

1. Sign up with Plivo.
2. Procure a number via the API or console.
3. Associate the number with an application responsible for initiating a call to the agent and establishing audio streaming over the WebSocket to your application. A sample reference is shown below.

At Plivo, Audio streaming is priced at $0.0040 per minute per stream, over and above the expected charges for voice minutes associated with a call. 

Note: Pricing is subject to change — check our pricing page for the most up-to-date information.

If you don’t already have a Plivo account, sign up today for free.

You can also connect with team Plivo to find out how we can help with your use case and get volume pricing for the same.

Supercharge your customers' interactions through audio streaming with Plivo powered AI voice agents.

We’re constantly and continually improving Plivo services, with particular attention paid to enhancements suggested by our users. Today we’re happy to announce two new APIs for Zentrunk, our SIP trunking service: the Trunk Properties API, which lets businesses create, modify, and update their SIP trunk configurations programmatically, and the Call Object API, which lets users retrieve Zentrunk call details records (CDR).

Trunk Properties API

Zentrunk users can already use the Plivo console to manage SIP trunk configuration and subresources such as credentials lists, IP access control lists, and origination URIs. But working in the console can be time-consuming when you have a lot of resources to manage. With the new API you can fetch and manage trunk properties programmatically, saving you time and effort. Our API documentation provides all the information you need to get started.

The Trunk Properties API offers Zentrunk users several benefits:

• Improved developer experience: The API lets service providers and enterprises create, modify, and delete SIP trunks programmatically.
• Access to subresources: The Trunk Properties API lets developers access subresources such as credentials, IP access control lists, and origination URIs, making it a complete trunk configuration management toolkit.
• Ease of use: The API uses standard RESTful web services, making it simple to integrate with existing systems.
• Enhanced security: The API supports authentication via Basic Auth, which enhances security.

Streamlined Zentrunk management

The Trunk Properties API transforms the process of setting up and managing SIP trunks. It offers an efficient and automated way to create, modify, and delete trunks. Its ease of use and real-time visibility features make it an excellent tool for service providers and enterprises. With the Trunk Properties API, users can streamline their SIP trunking service management and focus on delivering a better customer experience.

Call Object API

Our second new API addresses call details.

A call detail record, as you’d expect, contains all the details about a call. Until now you could view and export CDRs only by visiting Zentrunk > Logs on the Plivo console. The new Call Object API lets you retrieve CDRs for any completed calls using a variety of filters, saving you time and effort.

Zentrunk creates a Call object when an outbound call is initiated or when an inbound call is received. The Call object contains all of the information about completed calls. See our API documentation for complete details and code examples.

In brief, the Call Object API lets you retrieve all call records or retrieve calls for a given call UUID. The API supports filters that let you retrieve specific records based on different needs.

By using the Call Object API, Zentrunk customers can gain several benefits:

• Real-time data: The API provides real-time access to call data, allowing businesses to access and analyze information as it becomes available, without having to wait for manual exports or generate reports through the console.
• Improved automation: Businesses can automate the process of fetching CDRs and integrating their data into external systems for analytics, eliminating the need for manual data extraction.
• Improved call analytics: Businesses can use CDR information to gain insights into call patterns, call durations, and call costs, helping them make data-driven decisions to optimize their communication strategies.
• Efficient data retrieval: By using filters, businesses can perform targeted analyses of specific segments of their call data.
• Increased security and fraud detection: CDR information can help organizations detect unusual call patterns and identify potential security threats or fraudulent activities.
• Customized reporting: With data from the Call Object API, businesses can create reports tailored to their specific needs, allowing for more informed decision-making.

Try our new APIs

If you’re already a Zentrunk customer, we encourage you to peruse the documentation for the new APIs and consider how they could help your business. If you’re thinking about exploring the benefits of SIP trunking, we encourage you to sign up for a Plivo account, read our Quickstart Guide, and find out for yourself why people are so excited about SIP trunking.

SIP trunking lets you add phone lines that bypass the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and use VoIP instead. SIP stands for Session Initiation Protocol, while trunking refers to an aggregation of multiple phone lines. Many businesses are moving to SIP trunking and away from traditional telephony to benefit from advantages such as quick provisioning, low costs, and no equipment to procure or maintain. Zentrunk is Plivo’s SIP trunking service.

You can create and manage outbound and inbound trunks from the Plivo console. The Zentrunk menu is the fifth icon on the console menu. When you click it, you’ll see an overview screen that gives you quick instructions on creating trunks.

Following the Overview submenu are choices for Outbound Trunks and Inbound Trunks. Under each, you can see a list of existing trunks and, as on the overview screen, there’s a button to create new ones.

Clicking on a trunk in the list brings up details about it. Here, for example, is what you might see for an outbound trunk.

You can modify trunk details and settings from this page, or delete a trunk you no longer use. The settings are covered in detail in our documentation.

You can get details about inbound trunks the same way by clicking on an item in the Inbound Trunks list.

If you want to set up a new trunk, our documentation guides you through the process and explains all of the fields and settings.

Moving down, the Other Settings menu brings up a screen that lets you set up geo permissions, which you can enable to help curb fraud.

Another Other Settings menu page lets you consent to Plivo storing and accessing logs and media packet capture files, which we can use to debug call quality and DTMF issues.

The penultimate menu choice, Logs, displays a log of outbound and inbound SIP calls. Clicking on a log entry displays a Message Details popup that gives you information about the call.

Finally, the pricing menu page gives you the costs for calls and phone number rental in every country in which Plivo supports SIP trunking.

Step right up for another tour

That’s a whirlwind tour through the Zentrunk features on the Plivo console. We’ve got similar looks for the Voice, Messaging, Lookup, and Phone Numbers menus.

The latest quarterly G2 rankings are out, and Plivo leads the pack.

Plivo was named a Leader in the Communications Platform as a Service category. We received the highest Satisfaction score among products in our category — 99 out of 100, as voted by actual users of our platform.

To celebrate, one of my colleagues suggested we ask a generative AI platform for “99 reasons to love Plivo.” That might be challenging even for a human (yes, we’re biased in favor of biological life forms), but maybe nine reasons? That seems more doable.

We put the question to several generative AI platforms.

• Copy.ai
• Chatsonic
• ChatGPT
• Writer
• Google Bard
• Bing Chat
• You Chat

We gave all of them the same simple prompt:

“Give me nine reasons why people love the CPaaS platform Plivo.”

What we got back was interesting. Each of the platforms was able to quote many of the themes we pride ourselves on, but not always in the same way.

Every tool cited pricing as an advantage, touting Plivo as “cost-effective,” “affordable,” and “attractive,” among other things.

A couple of the platforms talked about the flexibility of our integration and development tools. A couple of others mentioned flexible pricing. One highlighted the flexibility of our premium support plans.

Scalability was on almost every list. One platform referred to it as “robust infrastructure.”

All but one had a bullet about reliability, but that one did call us reliable under both “robust infrastructure” and “proven track record.”

Every one mentioned our global reach — which comes in handy at those big tables at large family reunions.

They all mentioned our excellent customer support.

Most of the platforms mentioned security.

Finally, as we got down toward the end of the list, we got some varied responses: customizability, innovation, multiple communication channels, robust API, advanced features, comprehensive documentation, and proven track record.

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. And in fact we did say it ourselves, because generative large language models (LLM) like these tools train on large amounts of text, including, in all likelihood, our website and many other websites on which people have written about Plivo. They then string together likely combinations of words that can mimic expertise if the training based was good enough.

Generative AI platforms are not always right, however. In our case, while all of the good things were 100% correct, ChatGPT and Chatsonic noted that we offer video, and that’s not true. This is a good reminder not to rely on AI for your content. (This message was brought to you by your friendly local content marketer, who hopes to keep his job.)

Read what the robots wrote

Are you curious to see how each platform handled the answers? Let us know if you want us to post them verbatim on our LinkedIn page. Drop by there now and click that Follow button so you don’t miss them.