In 2024, approximately 60% of customers report that long holds and wait times are the most frustrating parts of a service experience. So, for every additional minute, businesses risk losing loyal customers and new opportunities for growth.

Worryingly, this risk does not end here. Repetitive inquiries and inefficient workflows can strain even the most experienced agents, leading to burnout and reduced productivity. 

This is where AI call center agents can help transform operations. Trained on specific datasets, AI can manage simple tasks like answering FAQs and handling complex queries with real-time sentiment analysis.

This article will explore the most impactful ways AI agents can help brands optimize customer experience.

What are AI call center agents?

AI call center agents are virtual assistants that manage customer service interactions typically handled by human agents. They are powered by artificial intelligence and use machine learning to interact with customers via phone, chat or messaging apps.

AI agents can understand and respond to a wide range of frequent customer queries, resolve issues and perform transactions with minimal human intervention. In a way, this is a more intuitive way compared to resolving customer queries through voice prompts and keypad inputs.

In 2023, 40% of contact center workers in the U.S. reported that AI has made their work easier, particularly in handling customer information tasks.

10 ways AI can optimize call center operations

A Gartner study indicates that 80% of companies are utilizing AI to enhance customer experience, with many planning further adoption by 2025. This is because, unlike traditional call center operations that struggle with long wait times, repetitive tasks, and an overwhelming number of customer inquiries, AI call center agents can accelerate and optimize call center operations. Here is how:

1.Round-the-clock availability for continuous support

AI call center agents operate 24/7, ensuring customers can access continuous support. Whether it is midnight inquiries or early morning complaints, businesses are always ready to interact and resolve requests.

Continuous support is necessary if your business operates globally and needs to support customers across different time zones. Some common use cases include answering FAQs, processing transactions, and escalating complex cases to human agents when necessary.

AI call center agents are also highly scalable and can simultaneously handle any number of customer interactions. This ensures your call center remains agile and adaptive, regardless of demand volume. 

Additionally, the flexibility allows call centers to maintain superior service levels without hiring additional staff.

2.Automation of repetitive tasks and FAQs

Call center agents often have to spend much time on manual and mundane tasks such as data entry and status updates. AI call center agents can take it away from their plate and automate these routine interactions, reducing processing time and optimizing workflows.

It also allows human agents to focus on more complex issues requiring problem-solving and critical thinking. Moreover, customer service automation resolves customer issues 52% faster, increasing overall productivity.

Some of the other areas where AI call center agents can help include:

• Order tracking and status updates
• Call summarization and transcription
• Ticket creation and management
• Real-time language translation
• Sentiment analysis
• Agent assistance with real-time suggestions
• Knowledge base management and updates
• Personalized customer interactions

3.Personalization of customer interactions

According to a study by McKinsey, 71% of consumers expect personalized interactions from companies, while 66% get frustrated when this doesn’t happen. To this end, call center AI agents can analyze customer data and tailor interactions based on preferences, history, and behavior.

AI agents can also track patterns in past interactions and customize real-time responses to provide a highly personalized experience. For example, if a shipment is delayed due to weather, the AI agent can notify and even offer a coupon code for the inconvenience.

Here are a few areas where personalization works best:

• Customer greetings and onboarding
• Tailored product or service recommendation
• Issue resolution based on history
• Proactive support based on customer behavior
• Loyalty programs and VIP experiences
• Personalized follow-ups and check-ins

4.Call routing and intelligent escalation

If appropriately trained, AI call center agents can handle most complex queries. However, they may face challenges when situations require critical thinking, advanced reasoning or solving multi-step problems. 

At times like this, transferring these complex queries to a human agent is critical to maintaining a consistent customer experience.

AI call center agents use intelligent call routing to direct customers to the appropriate agent or department. Human agents are also presented with relevant information about callers and their intent to make the process quick and easy. This can boost agent productivity while enhancing customer experience.

5.Handling high volumes and reducing wait times

AI call center agents are designed to handle high call volumes effortlessly, eliminating the need to hire extra staff. This allows your business to maintain high performance and responsiveness even during times like seasonal rushes or promotional spikes.

Additionally, customers get access to help without long wait times or hold music. AI agents can guide them through self-service options, providing added assistance so that agents don’t feel overburdened and pressured. 

Moreover, they can determine a customer’s intent and cues, identifying the top reasons for reaching out to offer quick and personalized service.

6.Real-time sentiment analysis for improved interaction

AI call center agents detect customer sentiment and analyze verbal cues, tone and language patterns in real-time or past conversations. They can determine if the interactions are positive, negative or neutral, allowing human agents to judge situations and respond accordingly.

Sentiment analysis can further help in the following:

• Enhancing customer satisfaction by prioritizing issues based on the tone of the customers 
• Driving proactive engagement by tailoring responses to match the customer’s emotional state
• Alerting the manager of the customer’s emotion and allowing them to listen to the interaction and guide the agent
• Improving marketing strategies by analyzing customer reviews, social media comments, and survey data

7.Predictive insights for proactive support

Implementing predictive analytics within call centers can improve efficiency and productivity by up to 60%, allowing for better handling of peak call times and reduced customer wait times.

By analyzing past customer interactions and historical data, AI call center agents can predict future behavior and preferences. This is done by collecting data from various sources, such as past purchases, browsing history, and even social media history. 

The data is subsequently organized and analyzed to identify patterns that people might overlook.

It can help in:

• Providing proactive support by enabling companies to get in touch with customers before they report an issue
• Identifying low and peak times and enabling businesses to allot duties to agents accordingly, avoiding overstaffing or understaffing
• Identifying cross-selling and up-selling opportunities to help companies deliver targeted offers

8.Streamlined onboarding and training

AI call center agents can accelerate onboarding and help newly hired agents gain confidence faster. They can also provide real-time guidance to human agents as they handle interactions by offering replies, suggestions, and relevant information based on the context of the conversation.

When reps cannot handle a difficult conversation, AI call center agents can instantly pull up the necessary information from the integrated knowledge base and CRM systems, eliminating the need to search for information manually. This way, they enable reps to respond faster and more accurately and help new hires navigate customer conversations more confidently. 

9.Perform quality control

Quality control is necessary to maintain a consistent customer experience. AI call center agents help managers conduct thorough quality assessments, gain actionable insights and tailor training programs to boost agent performance and improve customer satisfaction.

Here are a few ways AI call center agents can help perform quality control:

• Analyze call transcription by generating accurate call transcripts. This allows managers to review interactions and identify weak areas that can be improved through targeted training
• Assess call transcripts to reveal trends, common issues, and customer preferences to enable managers to make data-driven decisions for process enhancements
• Evaluate agent performance based on customer service goals and benchmark

10.Reduce call wrap-up times

AI call center agents can analyze real-time interaction or post call recordings to generate accurate call summaries based on the conversation. Based on the insights, AI generates a summary highlighting key information such as customer complaints, resolutions and the need for any follow-up. 

This reduces the average amount of time spent on each call, allowing agents to complete post-call tasks faster.

Experience the power of AI in customer service with Plivo CX

AI call center agents are gradually becoming a must-have for recalibrating call center operations. However, it is important to note that AI's key function is to support human agents and augment their skills, not replace them.

To deliver a truly exceptional customer experience, humans' empathy, understanding and personal connection will need to be combined with AI's accuracy, agility and speed.

As an all-in-one omnichannel customer service platform for MSMEs and enterprises, Plivo CX offers reliable support, accelerating the delivery of efficient and personalized service. 

The platform empowers businesses to run operations smoothly with intuitive AI-powered chatbots, IVR, and a unified agent desktop that brings disparate channels, such as email, voice, SMS, WhatsApp, and live chat, in a single window pane. 

What’s more, you can train the OpenAI-powered chatbots on custom company datasets so that the customer query response contains only the most appropriate and accurate information.

Some of the stand-apart features of Plivo CX include:

• Omnichannel support: View, track, and manage customer conversations across channels on a unified platform
• Available 24/7: Attend to customers around the world with continuous support
• Easy escalations with notes and summaries: Summarize conversations and escalate to human agents when necessary
• Comprehensive customer insights: Analyze real-time or recorded conversations to identify areas of opportunities and improvements
• Agent coaching tools: Guide your human agents with features such as call recording, barge, and whisper to improve performance
• Automated ticketing: Categorize and prioritize incoming tickets, ensuring that urgent issues are addressed promptly
• IVR: Create automated phone menus to guide callers and route them to the right department or agent
• Integration with CRM for better support: Pull customer information effortlessly from your existing CRM and tech stack

Book a demo now to start a free trial.

FAQs

1.Are AI call center agents secure?

Yes, reputed AI systems adhere to strict security and data privacy standards, ensuring customer data is handled securely. Many AI agents integrate directly with CRM systems and follow industry regulations to protect customer information.

2.How can AI call center agents improve customer experience?

AI agents provide quick, 24/7 support, reducing wait times and resolving common issues immediately. They can also route calls to the right departments, personalize interactions, and adjust responses based on customer sentiment, all of which contribute to a more satisfying customer experience.

3.Can AI call center agents help reduce operational costs?

Yes, AI call center agents can significantly reduce operational costs by handling high volumes of inquiries without the need for additional human agents. This helps businesses save on staffing and overtime costs while improving efficiency.

Every customer call holds valuable information about what they really want and how they feel about your company. Now that we can improve customer experience with artificial intelligence (AI), manually reviewing hundreds of sales calls to analyze the most or least effective talking points is a thing of the past.

Analyzing phone calls with AI reveals what resonates with customers and what doesn’t. If your call center AI tools highlight frequent inquiries about billing issues or service plans, you need to refine your service plan documentation and improve billing transparency.

The global AI market in the call center segment is projected to exceed $4 billion by 2027. This means many businesses are using AI call analysis to save time and improve customer experience. Whether you’re new to AI call analysis or looking to improve your existing strategies, this blog offers valuable insights to help you succeed.

How does AI call analysis work?

You can use AI to analyze phone calls and find valuable insights into customer needs and preferences. Here are some key approaches:

Transcribe audio to text

An AI call analysis tool transcribes conversations from audio to text in real time. This lets you search through call transcripts for specific sentences or phrases without listening to every call.

Say you notice a sudden spike in complaints about a product or service. You can quickly surf through call transcripts and search for specific words to pinpoint customer complaints. This way, you derive meaningful insights from customer calls in less time.

Sentiment analysis

An AI-based call analysis tool goes beyond words. It finds trends in conversation, including repeated keywords, speech patterns, and even customer sentiments and tone.  

The tool extracts emotions from various sources, including customer emails, chatbot histories, customer service call transcripts, comments on returns and refunds, and customer feedback or surveys.

Keywords and topic detection

Phone call analysis with AI automatically identifies key topics and keywords discussed during calls. This helps you spot trends, like recurring questions about a particular feature or a product, allowing you to update FAQs, training materials, or even product documentation.

The benefit? It significantly reduces call handling times and pushes agents to provide accurate and timely responses, automatically improving customer service.

Predictive analysis

AI call analysis has the power to analyze past interactions and predict future behaviors. So if a customer frequently asks about a product upgrade, you might proactively reach out with customized offers or share new product updates with those customers.

Using AI for customer service also facilitates market segmentation. Analyzing data on customer behavior, preferences, and demographics helps you identify segments that are likely to be the most profitable. 

This approach lets you focus on high-value customer segments, leading to lower costs for acquiring new customers.

Benefits of using AI to analyze phone calls

Analyzing phone calls with AI offers numerous advantages that can transform customer service operations, including:

Learning customer sentiments

Talking to hundreds of customers each day, it’s easy to misinterpret a good call for a bad one and vice versa. An AI-powered sentiment analysis helps understand how customers feel during interactions. It assesses the tone and emotion behind their words for you to pinpoint areas of frustration or satisfaction and tackle them head-on.

For example, if AI detects a high level of frustration in calls about a specific service, it prompts you to inform your marketing team or provide additional training to agents who may lack the necessary information to effectively address customer concerns.

Identifying trends

AI for customer service uncovers emerging trends in customer inquiries and concerns. Analyzing call data over time reveals recurring issues or topics, such as a rise in questions about a new product feature.

Use this insight to adapt your offerings, enhance marketing strategies, or update training materials to better equip your team.

Improving training and development initiatives

AI call analysis also identifies common challenges agents face. You can apply these insights to tailor training sessions for addressing specific skills or knowledge gaps.

For instance, if calls reveal that agents struggle with handling billing-related inquiries, you can help them understand the pricing structure and discount options to improve their confidence.This ultimately leads to a more competent team.

Step-by-step guide to implementing AI for call analysis

Here’s a step-by-step guide to using AI to analyze phone calls.

1. Choose an AI-powered communication tool

When it comes to AI call analysis, several popular options stand out. These are a few platforms and key features to consider when setting up your audio streaming platform:

• Gong: Provides an in-depth analysis of sales calls.
• CallRail: Focuses on marketing analytics and monitoring call performance and customer interactions.
• Telldesk: Offers real-time call analysis and helps identify trends and customer sentiment.

Depending on your objective, choose a platform that best suits your business. Consider these features when making your choice for an AI-powered communication tool:  

• Ease of integration with your existing CRM system
• Detailed analytics and visual dashboards
• Real-time call analysis
• Sentiment analysis
• User-friendly interface

2. Categorize calls

Choose call centers AI tools that categorize calls in real-time based on issue types, product inquiries, and customer satisfaction levels. This feature provides managers with better insights into common customer concerns and agent performance, making it easy to identify trends and training needs. 

For example, Plivo creates an AI-driven call summary within a few seconds, as opposed to manual note-taking, which could take minutes or more, depending on the complexity of the call.

Plivo segments calls by:

• Subaccount
• Geo-location
• Hangup details
• Carrier network
• Device metadata

3. Speech-to-text transcription

Choose an AI call analysis tool that captures user input with real-time transcription to perform sentiment analysis.

Plivo, for instance, offers support for speech recognition in 27 languages and their regional variants. It also offers pre-built use-case-specific IVR models with pre-answer that lets you specify what happens after a call is transferred but before it’s picked up.

Additionally, it filters profanity, detects and masks inappropriate content in transcriptions, and improves speech recognition accuracy with a list of hint words expected from the speaker. These features lead to better AI call analysis and save your business from legal risks and penalties due to profanity in content.

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4. Perform qualitative call analysis

Poor call quality directly impacts sales and customer satisfaction. When customers can't effectively communicate with your team, you risk losing sales opportunities and existing clients.

The solution is to choose a platform that performs — Plivo.

Tools like Plivo’s call debug UI quickly find the root causes of these issues, helping businesses mitigate these risks, improve overall call quality, and enhance customer experience.

With this feature, you get answers to:

• Who initiated the call?
• How and from where was the call initiated?
• Where did it terminate?
• Which device, operating system (OS), browser, and mic was used?
• Who hung up the call and why?
• What other legs were involved in the call flow?

Moreover, it collects feedback from end users using the Call Quality Feedback API. This process determines the root cause through correlations between audio quality metrics and various attributes, including network conditions, geolocation, and device metadata.

5. Generate comprehensive reports

A detailed summary of key call quality indicators such as latency, MOS, and packet loss makes complex data more accessible. You can tailor reports to suit different stakeholders, ensuring the information is relevant and easy to understand.

Plivo lets you access all or any of the call insights data within the console using existing views, or even push data to third-party AI tools/platforms.This makes the call not only more accessible but also actionable.

6. Implement continuous KPI performance monitoring

Key metrics provide insights into customer satisfaction. Regularly collecting feedback will help you stay in tune with customer needs and expectations.

Keep an eye on the following metrics:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): Measures loyalty by asking how likely customers are to recommend your product to others on a scale from 0 to 10.
• Customer Effort Score (CES): Assesses how easy or difficult it is for customers to interact with a company.
• First Contact Resolution (FCR): Indicates the percentage of customer issues resolved during the first interaction.

For example, tracking NPS reveals how likely customers are to recommend your service, while CES measures how easy it is for them to get their issues resolved. 

Incorporate Plivo’s VoIP solution for improved customer experience

Plivo easily integrates with existing AI tools/systems. It’s really a simple five-step process:

1. Sign up: Create an account on Plivo.
2. Purchase number: Acquire a number through the Plivo console or API.
3. Attach number: Link the number to your application.
4. Establish connection: Use the following XML instruction to start streaming:

<Response>
<Stream bidirectional="true" keepCallAlive="true">wss://yourstream.websocket.io/audiostream</Stream>
</Response>

‍

5. Send audio back: Stream audio back to Plivo using the websocket connection for real-time conversational interactions.

Once integrated, you can facilitate real-time call analysis and action on live audio data. With automated call transcriptions, you can easily dive into sentiment analysis, allowing you to understand customer emotions instantly. This capability ensures that you maintain high-quality calls, even during peak times, so your customers consistently receive top-notch service.

Plivo also offers a feature called Queueing, which enables AI analysis to capture and process all calls in the queue. Combining detailed debug logs with AI insights helps identify recurring call patterns and issues to encourage proactive problem-solving before escalation.

All of these powerful features come at a competitive price of just $0.003 per minute per stream for VoIP and audio streaming. Use AI to analyze phone calls with Plivo and improve your customer service experience.

Contact us today to learn more about how Plivo can improve customer experience with AI.

Twilio and Vonage are among the most well-known Communications Platforms as Service (CPaaS) providers. Gartner reviews highlight Vonage's robust, user-friendly features, which make it a reliable platform for businesses of all sizes. In contrast, Twilio stands out for its developer-focused, highly customizable APIs, appealing to businesses seeking more control and flexibility.

However, for businesses seeking the best of both worlds, Plivo offers a compelling alternative. It blends Twilio’s developer-friendly interface with Vonage’s comprehensive features, making it an ideal choice for scaling businesses looking to keep their communication costs in check.

In this blog post, we’ll compare Twilio vs. Vonage, and look closely at Twilio features, integrations, Vonage capabilities, and pricing. We’ll also explore how Plivo offers a strong middle ground for businesses seeking a balance between Twilio’s and Vonage’s unique offerings.

Twilio vs. Vonage: A quick comparison 

The table below focuses on comparing Twilio and Vonage, providing a brief overview of their functionalities.

Read on for an in-depth analysis of Twilio features, Vonage capabilities, Vonage API features, and pricing structures.

Twilio vs. Vonage: Detailed features comparison 

Both Twilio and Vonage offer powerful APIs and tools to enhance messaging, voice, and video capabilities, but they differ in key areas that could impact your decision. Here’s a detailed comparison of Twilio and Vonage features to help you find the best fit for your business.

Twilio SMS API features and use cases

• MMS support: Drive two-way engagement with cross-channel messaging for MMS and more using a single API.
• ‍Screen-sharing and live chat: Add live chat, share screens, and create custom video players.
• ‍Personalized messages: Customize messages for reminder notifications, delivery updates, and more.

Use cases

• Appointment reminders
• Delivery notifications
• Emergency alerts
• Send marketing messages
• Account notifications
• Verifications and OTPs

Vonage SMS API features and use cases

• Fraud Defender: Protect your revenue and reputation with real-time alerting and automatic blocking of suspicious traffic.
• Two-way messaging: Allow your customers to reply to messages for an interactive, chat-like experience.

• Call queuing: Automatically queue high-volume traffic to the carrier networks under each carrier’s regulations.
• Message concatenation: Split and seamlessly reassemble longer text messages according to carrier specifications.

Use cases

• Automated notifications
• Missed appointments
• Failed delivery attempts
• Order status updates and shipping alerts
• Promotional campaigns with detailed offers
• Service outage or maintenance alerts

Twilio Verify API features and use cases

• Actionable insights: Access dashboards showing conversion and success rates by region and channel, along with SMS fraud trends to optimize fraud prevention.
• Silent network authentication: Authenticate securely without user interaction, protecting accounts and transactions seamlessly within your app.
• Improved compliance: Build compliant healthcare and financial applications without requiring personally identifiable information (PII).
• Route optimization: Verify and use premium telephony routes on Twilio's Super Network to prioritize deliverability and speed.
• Multiple delivery channels: Deliver OTPs through SMS, WhatsApp, voice, and email, all via a single API.

Use cases

• Login protection
• Signup verification
• Improve message deliverability
• Personalize messaging and voice calls
• Stop SIM swap fraud
• Enrich data and risk models

Vonage Verify API features and use cases

• Pre-designed templates: Customize message templates, pre-record voice calls, and configure retry intervals for optimal user experience.
• Multi-channel authentication: Authenticate users across WhatsApp, email, Silent Authentication, SMS, and voice channels.
• Dynamic code generation: Generate unique verification codes in real-time to improve security for logins and transactions.
• Customizable workflows: Set up tailored verification workflows to match specific user journeys and security needs.

Use cases

• Fraud prevention during high-risk activities (e.g., large transfers)
• Protection for subscription sign-ups and recurring services
• Age verification for restricted content or purchases
• Secure access to financial or healthcare applications

Twilio Voice API features and use cases

• Interactive Voice Response (IVR): Build a self-service auto attendant menu that customers can navigate in multiple languages.
• Call transcriptions: Record and transcribe call conversations for live captions and future reference.
• Speech recognition: Use speech-to-text to enable voice forms, surveys, and lead qualification.
• Call tracking: Track caller details, call time, and integrate data into your CRM.

Use cases

• Self-service customer support
• Real-time call transcriptions for compliance
• Voice-based lead qualification
• Automated call tracking in CRM systems
• Customer surveys through voice forms

Vonage Voice API features and use cases 

• Automatic speech recognition: Add voice control and enable easy-to-use self-service with automatic speech recognition in over 120 languages.
• Call forwarding: Direct calls to different numbers or devices based on predefined rules or conditions.
• Real-time call control: Provide businesses with the ability to manage and control calls in real-time, including muting, recording, or transferring calls.
• Call recording: Record incoming and outgoing calls for future reference or compliance purposes.

Use cases

• Automated phone menus for customer self-service
• Compliance recording for financial and healthcare services
• International businesses establishing a local phone presence

Twilio Customer Engagement Suite

Twilio Flex

Twilio Flex allows you to manage interactions with customers across channels such as phone calls or emails. You can:

• Use your current voice carrier and phone number with Flex.
• Surface responses to customer questions to save time.
• Gain insights on customer conversations, track KPIs, and configure custom dashboards.
• Augment existing solutions with a custom IVR.
• Customers can engage via SMS, WhatsApp, voice, Facebook Messenger, WebChat, and more.

Twilio Engage

Twilio Engage makes it easy to launch email campaigns quickly and effectively. It helps you create emails with AI-generated headings, text, and images—cutting down hours of work. Built on clean, reliable data, it ensures your messages reach the right audience with greater impact.

The platform also provides tools for automating tasks, helping teams run effective campaigns with less effort and better results.

Vonage Contact Center

Vonage offers a powerful omnichannel contact center solution that lets agents handle all kinds of customer interactions, both internal and external.

The platform combines everything you need to keep your team productive, from team collaboration tools and workforce management to call routing and real-time analytics. This makes it a great fit for a variety of Vonage use cases, whether you're in sales, customer support, or even remote team management.

With Vonage, you can route calls to the right agents based on their skills, making sure customers are connected to someone who can help. The dynamic IVR system understands customers in dozens of languages. The AI-powered features support:

• Live sentiment analysis
• Call monitoring
• Whisper
• Barge

These features help coach agents in real time and ensure quality support at every step.

The accelerating demand for Voice AI finds companies RaftLabs building practical, domain-specific applications, primarily for high-stakes sectors like hospitality. Moving past generic call bots, Raftalabs prioritizes context-aware conversations for a human-like response. This powerful approach enables businesses to reduce costs while delivering excellent, empathetic customer engagement.

Twilio vs. Vonage customer support

When it comes to customer support, both Twilio and Vonage offer distinct approaches to assist businesses and end-users. This comparison highlights the key differences in their customer support plans.

Twilio customer support plans

• Developer plan: Provides basic support with API status notifications and web support, but no guaranteed response times.
• Production plan: Offers more robust support, with guaranteed response times for priority issues (3 hours for P1, 6 hours for P2, and 9 hours for P3), live chat support, and phone support, with a minimum monthly cost based on usage.
• Business plan: Delivers faster response times and higher-touch support, including phone and live chat. The pricing scale depends on monthly spending, starting at a minimum of $250 for the production plan.

Vonage customer support plans

• Standard plan: Caters to simple, non-critical Vonage use cases that require reliable support (8 am-5 pm) with best-effort response times. It includes access to the online knowledge base, email support, web support, and chat support, but doesn’t offer phone support.
• Priority plan: Offers 24/7 support with a service level objective for response times and phone support. It also includes service status notifications and a 99.99% platform availability service level agreement (SLA), starting at $750 per month.
• Premium plan: Caters to high-volume, mission-critical use cases, offering 24/7 support with guaranteed SLAs for response times, phone support, and access to the same platform availability SLA.
• Premier plan: Provides top-tier support, including a designated support engineer, customer solutions management, best practices guidance, quarterly roadmap webinars, and regular health checks and business reviews.

Twilio vs. Vonage: Pricing

Let’s compare Twilio pricing vs. Vonage pricing to get a clear view of how their cost structures compare.

Twilio pricing

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Vonage pricing

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Twilio vs. Vonage: Pros and cons

We’ve outlined the pros and cons of Twilio vs. Vonage to understand which solution provider better suits your business.

Twilio pros and cons

Pros

• Users appreciate Twilio's user-friendly setup, with clear instructions and an intuitive interface that makes integrating applications quick and easy, saving time and effort during onboarding. (Source)
• Several users have specifically enjoyed Twilio's feature that converts MMS messages to SMS. (Source)
• Some users have praised Twilio's developer documentation as thorough and immensely helpful. (Source)

Cons

• Some users have complained about poor customer support and that they had to resort to the community to solve a problem. (G2, TrustRadius)
• The cost gets high, especially for high-volume messaging requirements (Source)

Vonage pros and cons

Pros

• Several users have praised Vonage for its extensive feature set and wide range of integrations, stating that it covers almost every feature and integration imaginable. (Source)
• Users also enjoy its high-quality voice and video calls and easy configuration. (Source)
• Users have complimented Vonage Business Communications for its user-friendly interface, particularly when making changes to user profiles, voicemail passwords, and other settings. (Source)

Cons

• Some users have complained about frequent call drops due to a technical glitch. (Source)
• Several users have expressed frustration with the extension limit of three devices in Vonage, as it restricts their ability to work efficiently across multiple locations. (Source) 
• Users have also reported the software being complex and confusing, particularly when trying to find specific contacts or navigate certain features. (Source)

Here’s a quick breakdown of company sizes based on G2 data for both CPaaS providers:

• Twilio: 50.2% small businesses, 30% mid-market, 19.8% large enterprises.
• Vonage: 67.2% small businesses, 23.3% mid-market, 9.5% large enterprises.

Introducing Plivo: A reliable API solution

As the best communication platform for businesses, Plivo offers reliable coverage in over 220 countries and territories, ensuring your messages and calls reach users worldwide. 

In addition to global coverage, Plivo stands out among the three providers for its user-friendly interface, transparent pricing, and a well-rounded combination of customizable features. It has earned strong reviews from users on platforms like G2.

Moreover, Plivo’s user base predominantly consists of small businesses, with 79.1% of its users coming from this segment, 16% from mid-market companies, and 4.8% from large enterprises. This makes Plivo an ideal choice for growing businesses that need a scalable, cost-effective CPaaS solution.

Here’s a quick rundown of Plivo’s API solutions.

• SMS API: Plivo’s SMS API lets businesses send and receive text messages globally. Whether you're sending promotional offers, appointment reminders, or verification codes, Plivo makes it simple to integrate SMS into your application.

• Voice API: Plivo's Voice API allows you to make and receive high-quality voice calls, automate workflows with IVR (Interactive Voice Response), and even build custom call centers. It’s great for businesses looking to add voice functionality to their apps or improve customer service by handling calls efficiently with auto attendants.

• Verify API: Plivo’s Verify API streamlines user authentication with two-factor authentication (2FA), using SMS, voice calls, or email for businesses that need to securely verify users, or add extra layers of security during sign-ins.
• WhatsApp Business API: With Plivo’s WhatsApp Business API, you can engage with customers on the world’s most popular messaging platform. Plivo simplifies the integration of WhatsApp into your business’s communication strategy, enabling you to send order updates, customer support messages, and promotional content.

Audio streaming: Plivo’s audio streaming feature gives you access to the raw audio stream of your voice calls by transmitting live audio to your backend. Your sales team can use it to:  

• Build voice-based AI applications that respond to support queries.
• Get real-time transcription or sentiment analysis.
• Create IVR systems with conversational support to handle customer requests. 

It stands out for its robust customer support options, especially for premium users, who prefer 24/7 access to assistance. From getting started to scaling, Plivo's support team provides assistance with troubleshooting, guidance, and solutions.

Plivo’s API solutions provide businesses with flexible, scalable communication tools, whether for global SMS, voice calls, secure verifications, or WhatsApp messaging. Their reliable network coverage and responsive support ensure your business stays connected and efficient, no matter where your customers are.

Book a demo to see for yourself.

One-time password (OTP) scams are a growing threat to businesses and consumers alike.

In 2021, US consumers lost a staggering $13.9 billion to fraud, with OTP scams accounting for a significant portion of these losses. This rising trend poses serious financial and reputational risks for businesses.

But what exactly is OTP fraud, and how do scammers exploit it? Let’s see.

What is OTP fraud?

An OTP is sent to individuals by mobile phone or email. It’s used to authenticate transactions, such as logging into accounts or making payments.

Fraudsters, however, exploit this security feature through various tactics. These include SIM swapping, phishing emails, fake tech support calls, and social engineering. They design each of these methods to trick individuals into revealing their OTPs.

How does OTP fraud work?

OTP fraud takes place when an attacker uses the OTP system to gain unauthorized access to someone’s financial accounts or online profiles. Here’s how it works:

1. Targeting victims: Fraudsters often select targets based on their online behavior, weak points in communication methods like SMS or email, or publicly shared information on social media.
2. Launching the attack: They employ phishing techniques to impersonate legitimate organizations, such as banks or e-commerce platforms. They focus on creating a sense of urgency through emails, SMS, or phone calls to trick targets into taking action.
3. Collecting personal information: The phishing messages lead to fake websites that look like trusted ones. Here, targets unknowingly provide personal details like usernames and passwords.
4. Trapping with OTPs: The fake website triggers the OTP and sends it to the target’s phone. Fraudsters then use various methods to steal the OTP, such as:

• Social engineering: The attacker may try to convince the individual to share the OTP, claiming it is for account verification.
• Malware Interception: If malware infects the individual’s device, it intercepts and captures the OTP without the user’s knowledge.

5. Taking over the account: With the user credentials and OTP, the fraudster can access the account. This allows them to perform unauthorized transactions, steal data, or take control of future OTPs.

Common methods used by scammers

OTP phishing attacks take many forms, each targeting different vulnerabilities in users.

Below are some common OTP fraud tactics:

Smishing

Smishing is a term that combines “SMS” and “phishing.” Here, fraudsters use fake text messages to trick individuals into downloading malware or sharing sensitive information, like OTPs.

Smishing attacks have become more common. In 2023, 75% of organizations reported facing these types of attacks.

Scammers often hide their identity by spoofing phone numbers or sending texts from email accounts. For example, smishing texts often include links or attachments that seem safe but lead to fake websites.

These imitation sites look like real financial or service provider portals, where users may unknowingly enter their login credentials and OTPs. This gives scammers access to real accounts.

SIM swapping

SIM swapping occurs when fraudsters trick a mobile carrier into transferring a victim's phone number.

Here’s how it works:

• Attackers gather personal information like names, addresses, or answers to security questions, often through phishing, data breaches, or dark web purchases.
• This information is used to impersonate the victim and contact the mobile carrier, claiming that the scammers lost or damaged the SIM card. They then ask the carrier to transfer the victim's phone number to a new SIM.
• If the carrier fails to verify the request, the fraudster takes control of the number. From there, they intercept calls, texts, and verification codes, allowing them to bypass security and access sensitive accounts.

This growing problem has had a significant financial impact.

In 2023 alone, SIM swapping fraud caused over $48 million in losses, targeting both individuals and companies

So, to protect your business from SIM-swapping attacks, combining the right technology with a proven approach is essential.

Using Plivo, you can validate phone numbers smoothly, ensuring fraudsters can’t take advantage of SIM swaps.

The Plivo Lookup API helps detect SIM swaps in real time. It offers phone number validation and key analytics to assess risks. Some of the critical data it provides includes:

• Current and original network details
• Roaming status and network changes
• Risk scores and unusual patterns that indicate fraud

Businesses can spot suspicious activity and take action before any harm occurs with these insights.

SMS pumping

SMS pumping, or artificially inflated traffic (AIT), is a cybercrime aimed at businesses that rely on SMS for sending OTPs or app download links.

In this type of attack, bots fill out a company’s online forms with fake phone numbers controlled by attackers. Believing these to be real requests, the business sends out SMS messages to these fake numbers.

For businesses, SMS pumping increases messaging costs, wastes resources, and can overwhelm systems.

Plus, if customers see too many unnecessary OTPs, it may damage their trust in the company.

To address this, Plivo has two built-in security layers—Fraud Shield and SMS Pumping Protection—that help protect Verify and Messaging traffic from SMS pumping attacks. Both features use an advanced detection model to identify artificially inflated traffic and block suspicious messages before they’re sent, helping reduce exposure to fraud and unnecessary costs.

The Geo Permissions feature also gives you control over where messages are sent by allowing you to enable or disable countries and apply message-per-hour thresholds based on your risk tolerance.

Voice phishing (vishing)

Vishing, or voice phishing, is a type of scam where fraudsters use phone calls to trick people into sharing sensitive information, like login details, credit card numbers, or bank account info. Scammers exploit this data for identity theft and financial fraud, making vishing widespread and costly.

In 2023, over 56 million U.S. adults — about 21% of the population — fell victim to phone scams, resulting in losses totaling $25.4 billion.

In vishing scams, attackers often impersonate trusted organizations and use phone calls to create a sense of urgency and trust. They also build a personal connection over the phone, reacting to what the victim says and using emotional cues.

How OTP scams impact businesses

Here’s how scammers misuse OTPs and why this should be a major concern for businesses:

Account takeovers

Stealing or tricking users into sharing their OTP allows fraudsters to bypass security, gain control of accounts, and access private information or funds.

This can harm trust and cause legal problems for businesses, especially those handling sensitive data or finances.

In fact, the average cost of a data breach in 2023 was $4.45 million, underscoring the serious financial impact of such security failures.

Unauthorized transactions

With OTPs, scammers can authorize fraudulent transactions. If they gain access to a customer’s account, they can make purchases, transfer funds, or exploit stored payment methods.

As a result, businesses may face chargebacks, financial losses, and increased scrutiny from payment providers due to such fraudulent activities​.

Fake account registration and spamming

Some scammers use stolen OTPs to create fake accounts on business platforms, taking advantage of promotional offers or testing one-time passcode security.

Fake registrations can distort the numbers, affect data accuracy, and lead to spam, resulting in unnecessary management overload.

Spreading malware or phishing attacks

If scammers access your business email or social media accounts, they can send phishing messages or malware links to your contacts.

Scammers make these messages look authentic, so recipients are more likely to trust and open them. This spreads the scam further and damages your reputation. It also puts your clients, partners, and employees at risk.

Practical tips for protecting against OTP fraud

To effectively protect your business from OTP fraud, it's important to take a proactive approach. Implementing strong security measures can significantly reduce risks.

Here are some practical tips for businesses to safeguard against OTP fraud:

Implement 2FA with fraud prevention

Two-factor authentication (2FA) adds an important layer of security by requiring both a password and an OTP.

However, despite its effectiveness, many organizations are still not fully adopting this security measure. In fact, a recent survey found that 64% of organizations haven't fully adopted multi-factor authentication (MFA).

This is concerning because research shows that MFA can block over 99.9% of account takeover attacks. Without MFA, businesses are leaving their accounts — and their customers — vulnerable to fraud.

Plivo's 2FA/OTP capabilities can help overcome OTP verification vulnerabilities. Adding these extra layers of security prevent account takeovers, reduce fraud risks, and secure high-value transactions.

Additionally, Plivo provides several advanced features to further enhance security:

• Geo permission management: Control which countries your Plivo account can send SMS or make calls to, blocking high-risk areas.
• International toll fraud protection: Manage connections to premium numbers and set blacklists to prevent toll fraud.
• Pattern-based alerts: Get notified about unusual SMS or voice activity, like sudden drops in delivery rates, to detect potential fraud early.

Given the growing risk of cyberattacks, it’s more important than ever to implement 2FA. By doing so, you can better protect your business and customers from fraud.

Monitor and track OTP delivery effectiveness

Delays or failed OTP deliveries can frustrate users, damage trust, and open doors for attackers to exploit system weaknesses.

With Plivo’s real time delivery reports, businesses can monitor OTP performance globally. This helps track delivery rates and identify potential issues. 

Businesses can use this data to quickly address problems and ensure they deliver OTPs promptly and securely.

Limiting OTP validity and attempt frequency

Setting a time limit for OTP validity and limiting the number of attempts helps prevent misuse and reduces fraud risk.

Businesses can also lower the chances of attackers guessing or intercepting valid codes. This ensures that only legitimate users can complete the authentication process within the allowed time.

Regularly update your security protocols and stay compliant

Staying compliant with security standards ensures that businesses are using the latest practices to protect data. This helps guard against new fraud techniques and reduces the risk of breaches.

Choose a OTP service provider, such as Plivo, that ensures continuous compliance with security standards. Plivo designs its OTP solutions to adhere to regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

With advanced security features and detailed reporting, Plivo makes it easier for businesses to stay compliant and protect sensitive user data.

Choose a secure algorithm

Use strong algorithms like HMAC-based one-time passwords (HOTP) or time-based one-time passwords (TOTP).

These options are reliable because they generate unique and hard-to-predict OTPs. Their cryptographic methods help protect against common attacks, ensuring secure authentication.

Provide multiple delivery options

Flexibility is important for OTP delivery. Offering choices like SMS, email, or voice ensures users can receive their OTPs in the way that suits them best. 

This also improves user experience and offers a backup if one method doesn't work.

Educate users on security best practices 

Teaching users about security best practices for OTPs reduces the risk of fraud and strengthens overall protection. Encourage users to create strong, unique passwords, avoid sharing OTPs, and recognize phishing attempts.

Regularly remind them about the importance of safeguarding their accounts and following secure authentication processes to prevent unauthorized access.

Prevent OTP fraud with the help of Plivo today

When selecting an OTP provider, it's important to choose one that offers both robust security and user-friendly features. Plivo provides a secure and adaptable OTP solution, designed to fit your unique needs.

Plivo’s OTP services simplify the authentication process, offering global SMS delivery, instant reporting, and customizable templates for easy implementation.

Whether it's safeguarding transactions, verifying users, or securing sensitive information, Plivo’s OTP services offer the reliability and flexibility necessary for your security needs.

Want to see how Plivo can assist in preventing OTP fraud? Contact us today.

A voice API is a tool that software developers use to make and receive phone calls programmatically. With a voice API, they can use various channels, phones, browsers, and virtual assistants.

 It connects web or mobile applications to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), enabling seamless voice communication without needing extensive telecom expertise, time, and developer resources.

Voice APIs are highly configurable, easily integrated, and scalable tools, providing cost-effective communication for businesses.

‍How much does a voice API cost? 

A voice API costs typically range from $0.003 to $0.014 per minute for outbound calls and $0.003 to $0.022 per minute for inbound calls, depending on call type, provider, and features. 

Prices may differ due to factors like infrastructure, service quality, and additional features like real-time analytics or automated routing. 

Using a voice API makes more financial and logistical sense for businesses than investing resources into developing advanced voice calling features from scratch. By choosing a best-in-class voice API provider, companies can integrate various voice capabilities with a shorter development span and achieve a better ROI. 

Plivo offers cost-effective solutions with competitive pricing while maintaining high-quality services.

Here’s a quick comparison of pricing for each type of voice call between Plivo and Twilio to give an idea of voice API cost structures and offerings.

‍How can a voice API give customers a better experience? 

Integrating a voice API enables businesses to offer personalized, efficient customer support services on browsers or apps with advanced voice features. It can help reduce voice call traffic and wait times in contact centers. These APIs can route calls efficiently through the phone network, including toll-free phone numbers, ensuring smooth call handling.

Unlike older inflexible phone network systems, a programmable voice API supports AI-powered virtual assistants that can receive calls 24/7, understand user requests, and guide customers through their queries as effectively as human agents. With voice recognition and text-to-speech features, customers can express themselves naturally and receive the assistance they need without delay.

The voice bot can also record calls and collect contextual data to prepare agents to resolve the issue when they take over quickly. This streamlined process saves time and preserves the unique, personal touch of voice calling.

Features like click-to-call, voice control, and hands-free interactions also increase flexibility, allowing users to have an interactive and engaging call. 

Wouldn’t it be nice to simply say the query out loud and receive a clear response instantly?

A voice API makes this possible by enabling your company to answer customers' questions instantly without navigating through endless clicks. Voice API seamlessly integrates voice solutions into browsers or apps to transform the customer experience. 

There’s more to it:

• Interactive and hands-free features: Customers can use click-to-call, voice commands, or hands-free interactions, enhancing convenience.
• Personalized customer support services: Offer tailored assistance with AI-powered virtual assistants and voice recognition features. These tools help customers articulate requests naturally and get relevant responses.
• 24/7 availability: AI-powered virtual assistants answer calls anytime, providing immediate assistance, even outside business hours.
• Enhanced agent support: Voice bots can record calls, gather context, and equip agents with the information they need to resolve issues swiftly when human intervention is required.

Voice APIs streamline communication and create a memorable, user-friendly experience that fosters trust and loyalty.

How can a voice API streamline communication processes?

A voice API makes interactions more efficient and aligned with business goals and needs. Here's how:

• Makes it easy for customers to connect: Unlike traditional voice calls confined to phone networks, a programmable voice API extends voice capabilities to an app or website. Users can use a click-to-call feature directly within an app or site.
• Adds efficiency to your team: Automating routine customer interactions allows voice bots to handle a significant portion of inbound calls. This reduces call traffic in the contact center, freeing human agents to manage complex or high-priority cases.
• Scales with business: As businesses grow, you can seamlessly expand voice-enabled services, ensuring consistent voice call handling without sacrificing quality. For example, businesses can use voice APIs to automate phone calls for marketing campaigns or appointment reminders.
• Supports developers: From a developer's perspective, a voice API integrates smoothly with other APIs and communication platforms. 
• Offers robust security: Programmable voice APIs often come with robust security features, including encryption and secure call record storage, in compliance with regulations like GDPR or HIPAA. 

Take, for example, CallHub.

They use Plivo's voice API to simplify communication for political campaigns, offering tools like power and predictive dialers. These features let campaigns reach voters efficiently, connecting them directly with representatives or leaving messages without manual effort. Browser-based calling also ensures volunteers' privacy, making it secure and straightforward for customers to interact.

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Choosing a voice API provider

Programmable voice APIs can range from basic functionality to feature-rich platforms that handle complex voice call flows and integrations. Here’s what to look for when evaluating a voice API provider:

Comprehensive call management features

A strong voice API should include fundamental voice call management functions to make, receive, and record calls, and global audio conferences. To ensure effective communication, look for APIs that offer configurable conference experiences, such as muting/unmuting participants, automatic call termination, and host controls.

Text-to-speech and accessibility options

Text-to-speech (TTS) is essential for both accessibility and user convenience. It converts text into spoken output, making automated systems more user-friendly, especially for multitasking or on-the-go customers. 

Ensure your provider's TTS capabilities support multiple languages and accents to cater to diverse customer needs.

Smart interactive voice response (IVR) systems

A voice API should enable the creation of intelligent, multi-level interactive voice response (IVR) systems that route calls efficiently. 

Smart IVRs can handle straightforward customer service tasks autonomously, incorporating:

• AI technologies for interactive experiences
• Intelligent call routing
• Integration with multiple channels
• Call recording and TTS capabilities

These capabilities help build customer-first IVR solutions that guide users seamlessly to the right department or agent.

Real-time call handling and notifications

Real-time features such as Answering Machine Detection (AMD) are invaluable for optimizing call strategies based on the type of response received. 

AMD helps identify whether an outgoing call is answered by a human or voicemail, which is especially beneficial for tasks such as lead follow-ups, customer updates, and automated voice surveys.

Integration with existing systems

The right voice API should facilitate integration with communication systems, including SIP-enabled hardware and software. 

This adaptability allows your business to maintain flexibility as communication needs evolve.

Audio streaming

Audio streaming, or media streaming, is a vital feature that sets advanced voice APIs apart. This functionality allows your application to deliver calls while duplicating call media to multiple recipients. It also enables real-time analysis and enhances features like sentiment analysis, conversational AI, call transcriptions, fraud detection, and voice biometrics.

Plivo stands out by offering all of these essential voice API capabilities. Moreover, it offers advanced features, such as:

• Play audio prompts: Plays pre-recorded audio files during a call, making it useful for IVR menus or announcements. This feature facilitates caller engagement and delivers professionalism in communication.
• Text to speech: Converts text into natural voice messages in various languages. It supports real-time updates like notifications, reducing dependency on pre-recorded audio and increasing flexibility.
• Dual channel call recording: Captures conversations with separate audio tracks for each participant. This allows for detailed analysis of interactions, making it ideal for call centers or compliance needs.
• Custom caller ID: Displays a specific phone number during calls, which builds brand trust and increases the likelihood of calls being answered. It’s particularly helpful for global and region-specific outreach efforts.
• Get digit input: Collects user responses via keypad entries, making it useful for gathering information such as account numbers or confirming choices during calls. It simplifies customer interactions and integrates effectively into IVR systems.
• Advanced call control: Gives businesses detailed control over call functions like transfer, mute, and hold. This capability supports smoother call handling and enhances customer support operations.
• Supervisor coaching: Allows supervisors to listen in on live calls and provide guidance without the caller being aware. This feature supports agent training and improves call outcomes as they happen.
• Call whisper: Plays a short message to the agent before connecting the call, providing context about the caller or the purpose of the call. It helps agents prepare better, leading to more tailored and effective support.

How does Plivo's voice API work?

Plivo's voice API is a robust framework that enables developers to manage voice communications programmatically with REST APIs to allow comprehensive control over call flows—from initiation to termination. 

Throughout a call's lifecycle, Plivo sends webhooks at various stages, prompting your application to respond with specific commands. This dynamic exchange between webhooks and responses provides granular control over call behavior, facilitating the creation of customized and efficient voice communication solutions.

What makes a good voice API?

A good API is easy to build. It offers flexibility and customization options to cater to different users’ needs and tailor a top-notch experience for your customers. 

Here’s what to look for:

SDKs and robust documentation 

A good voice API provider should offer developers comprehensive Software Development Kits (SDKs) and robust documentation to ease the development process. 

Plivo offers client SDKs for browser (JavaScript) and mobile (native iOS and Android) with no upfront costs. Plus, access extensive product documentation with quickstart guides, tutorials, and product overviews to cover various use cases.

Connect and control calls to any device 

Voice API should allow developers to build powerful voice workflows and integrate voice calling into web and mobile apps. 

With Plivo, you can connect phone calls over the PSTN to more than 200 countries without managing complex telecom carrier interactions. This flexibility extends to SIP-enabled devices and software, allowing seamless connection to your existing SIP infrastructure and enabling advanced communication features in the cloud.

Premium network

A premium network is essential for a voice API to deliver clear, uninterrupted audio quality, as it minimizes delays, reduces jitter, and ensures stable call connections. 

Plivo ensures premium voice quality through its Regional Points of Presence (PoPs), which reduce latency and maintain high call quality using one-hop, in-country carrier connections. 

Great developer support

Sometimes, a voice API can be complicated and needs assistance; make sure your provider offers 24x7 premium support backed by a consultative customer success team that provides the technical guidance and industry expertise developers need. 

Those additional support resources can  include:

• Extensive documentation and a rich knowledge base
• Up-to-date service status and product updates
• Regular product improvements and enhancements

Upgrade your business communication with Plivo's voice API

We've covered what a voice API is and what to look for in a provider—now it's time to put that knowledge into action. Upgrade your business communication with Plivo's voice API, a powerful, flexible voice API that meets your business needs.

If you'd like to receive customized rates with guided onboarding and premium support, get our volume prices. A team member will contact you to help determine whether an annual agreement suits you based on your personal use case.

Plivo’s simple, usage-based pricing model ensures that businesses only pay for what they use, making it a cost-effective choice.

‍

Growing businesses require more sophisticated communication features, such as automation, solid customer support, and easy integration with existing systems.  So businesses with more advanced messaging requirements may find value in exploring additional messaging API options that offer even more customization and scalability for their needs. 

Fortunately, there are plenty of Bird alternatives that can provide tailored solutions for your unique needs.

In this blog, we’ll explore the seven best alternatives to Bird and compare their features, functionalities, and pricing to help you find the right communication platform for your business.

Bird alternatives at a glance

Let’s quickly review the seven most popular Bird competitors and their unique functionalities at a high level.

7 best Bird alternatives in 2024

Here is a more detailed analysis of our top seven picks for the best SMS service providers.

1. Plivo

Features

• SMS auto-responder: Plivo’s SMS auto-responder ensures that all queries are addressed promptly to keep customers satisfied and informed.
• Conference call: Connect multiple people with a pin to a single call, enabling collaboration and communication among teams, clients, or stakeholders.
• Voice-based notifications: Stay in touch with your customers by dispatching customized audio alerts through voice calls. This feature ensures that your important messages are heard loud and clear.
• Voice survey: Plivo uses voice surveys to collect information from customers with satisfaction scores of a service.
• Voicemail: Capture a caller's information even while you're away and use the obtained insights later.
• Scalable cloud IVR: Build multi-level interactive voice response (IVR) menus to route every call intelligently so that no query is left unanswered.
• Call forwarding: Forward calls to your office, mobile, or home number. 
• Voicemail transcription: Access Plivo’s premium voicemail transcription service, which provides real-time, high-quality, and accurate transcripts.
• Reusable templates: Use a vast library of ready-to-use templates to add powerful functionality with minimal code with Verify API.
• Text-to-speech: Convert written text into natural-sounding speech in multiple languages and accents, removing communication barriers to analyze customer insights with ease.
• Fraud protection: With Plivo’s Fraud Shield, you can easily keep an eye on messaging activity without constant manual checks. Automatically detect unusual patterns and set thresholds specific to each country to respond swiftly to potential issues with no extra costs. 
• Lowest costs per verification: You don't pay for verification, only for channel costs with no hidden charges. 
• Reach customers across channels: Send OTPs to customers using SMS, Voice, and WhatsApp across multiple channels. 
• Pay per conversation in WhatsApp messaging: Plivo's pricing structure allows you to send more messages without increasing costs.

Pros

• Affordable option
• User-friendly interface
• Responsive customer support

Cons 

• API call logs could be more informative. (G2)
• Configuration automation is being improved. (G2)

Ratings and reviews 

G2: 4.5/5 (720+ reviews)

Capterra: 4.3/5 (85+ reviews)

Pricing

SMS API

Outbound: $0.0055/SMS

Get detailed pricing

Voice API

Outbound: $0.0100/min

Inbound: $0.0055/min 

Get detailed pricing

Verify API

$0 verification fee; only pay SMS, Voice, or WhatsApp charge

Get detailed pricing

WhatsApp

Meta’s fee +  platform fee (Rs. 0.067/conversation)

Suitable for

Plivo is one of the best messaging alternatives to Bird for businesses seeking a reliable, comprehensive, and cost-friendly communication platform.

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2. Twilio

Features 

• Omnichannel communication: Twilio supports multiple messaging channels beyond SMS, including MMS, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger, allowing for richer customer interactions compared to Bird’s primarily SMS-focused services.
• Advanced authentication: Comprehensive security features like 2FA and programmable SMS for verification processes enhance user security compared to Bird’s standard offerings.
• Voice intelligence: Transform voice calls into actionable data insights with machine learning and AI.

Pros

• Extensive API documentation.
• An array of communication APIs available.
• Multi-channel communication support.

Cons 

• Poorly documented integration requirements lead to implementation delays and higher error risk. (G2)
• Advanced features are difficult to implement. (G2)
• UI/UX can be improved. (G2)

Ratings and reviews 

G2: 4.2/5 (475+ reviews)

Capterra: 4.4/5 (455+ reviews)

Pricing

SMS API

Outbound: $0.0079/SMS

Inbound: $0.0079/SMS

OUtbound: $0.002/MMS

Inbound: $0.01/MMS

Voice API

Outbound: $0.0140/min

Inbound: $0.0085/min

Verify API

$0.05 authentication fee/SMS + channel fee

WhatsApp

$0.004/conversation

Suitable for

Twilio is ideal for large enterprises with generous budgets seeking a comprehensive communications provider with a global reach.

3. Telynyx

Features

• Noise suppression: Telnyx offers noise suppression and HD voice codecs to ensure the best possible audio inputs.
• Real-time transcription: It offers real-time transcription on a live call, activated via one API command. It speaks dynamic text in 29 languages and accents. 
• Smart IVR: Build a multi-level IVR phone tree to intelligently route your call flows via dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) or voice commands.

Pros

• Easy-to-use interface.
• Affordable pricing.
• Good customer support.

Cons 

• Lack of APIs and automation to submit port requests. (G2)
• Setting up features like SIP trunking and VOIP call routing is complicated. (G2)

Ratings and reviews

G2: 4.7/5 (415+ reviews)

Capterra: 4.7/5 (115+ reviews)

Suitable for

Telynyx is a great Bird alternative for businesses seeking an advanced way to optimize call handling and improve customer interactions through smart IVR or speech-to-text.

4.Vonage 

Features

• Programmable video: Vonage offers robust video APIs that allow businesses to integrate high-quality video conferencing into their applications. 
• Call control and analytics: Vonage enables businesses to monitor and optimize call performance beyond basic voice capabilities.
• IVR support: Vonage includes customizable IVR solutions that enhance customer service by automating call routing, which is unavailable in Bird’s offerings.
• Unified communications: Vonage integrates multiple communication channels, including SMS, voice, and video, streamlining user experience and management compared to Bird.

Pros 

• Low latency and high deliverability rates.
• Easy-to-use tools to investigate reports of message delivery.
• Easily integrates into your existing ATS and CRM tools.

Cons

• Some users have complained of call drops due to technical glitches. (G2)
• Customer service leaves much to be desired; reaching out is difficult. (G2)
• Poor call quality: users report static and inaudible voices (G2, G2)

Ratings and reviews

G2: 4.3/5 (465+ reviews)

Capterra: 4.1/5 (305+ reviews)

Pricing

SMS API 

Outbound: $0.07849/SMS

Inbound:$0.00616/SMS

Verify API

€0.050 per successful verification

WhatsApp API

$0.0488/conversation + Vonage platform fee

Suitable for

Vonage API solutions are a strong alternative to Bird for businesses seeking comprehensive communication features, including voice, messaging, and video, all integrated into a single platform for improved customer engagement.

5. Podium

Features 

• Sentiment analysis: Podium helps businesses understand customer emotions by analyzing reviews and feedback, enabling agents to respond effectively and improve overall customer satisfaction.
• Conversion rate optimization: Podium empowers businesses to refine their messaging strategies, turning more interactions into sales and enhancing the overall effectiveness of their marketing efforts.
• Text message marketing: Engage customers directly through SMS to promote timely offers and updates that drive sales growth and engagement rates.
• Automated appointment reminders: Reduce no-show rates by ensuring clients receive timely notifications, leading to better scheduling efficiency and higher satisfaction.

Pros

• Centralized platform for managing customer interactions.
• Seamless payment transactions via text messaging.
• Analytics features to enhance communication strategies.

Cons

• Steep learning curve is involved. (G2)
• Lack of adequate customer support. (G2, G2)
• Disorganized customer onboarding experience. (G2)

Ratings and reviews

G2: 4.6/5 (1686+ reviews)

Capterra: 4.3/5 (500+ reviews)

Suitable for

It’s a comprehensive messaging platform and one-stop solution for connecting with customers, managing reviews, collecting payments, and streamlining team communication.

6. Sinch

Features

• Two-way messaging: Use WhatsApp to interact with customers and respond to queries directly. 
• Schedule messages: Queue messages and set message validity periods, like expiry dates, for time-sensitive messages.
• SMS fallback: If messages fail to deliver or other communication channels do not work, this feature ensures critical messages always get delivered.

Pros

• Reliable and easy-to-use platform.
• Offer audio calls, video calls, and chat functionality, without complex coding.

Cons

• Poor and inadequate customer support. (G2, G2)
• Some users have encountered problems with Sinch's payment system, stating that they were debited but did not receive the corresponding credits. (G2)

Ratings and reviews 

G2: 3.9/5 (29+ reviews)

Capterra: 4.4/5 (40+ reviews)

Pricing

SMS API

Outbound: $0.0078/SMS

Inbound: $0.0078/SMS

Voice 

Outbound: $0.01/min

Inbound: $0.004/min 

Country: India

Starter: Rs. 2,999

Scale: Rs. 15,999

Large: Rs.29,999

Custom pricing: Ideal for large enterprises 

Suitable for

Sinch is a strong Bird alternative for businesses seeking robust SMS and voice solutions that improve customer engagement.

7. Bandwidth

Features

• Direct-to-carrier network: Bandwidth offers a direct-to-carrier network for superior reliability in messaging and calling. 
• Call recording: Record calls and voicemails in mono or dual-channel format to maintain accurate records of conversations for compliance. 
• Cost-effective pricing: It's one of the best alternatives to Bird given its pay-as-you-go model, resulting in lower costs for high-volume users. 
• Flexible integration: Bandwidth's APIs easily integrate with existing systems, helping businesses customize their communication solutions. 

Pros

• Easy-to-use platform with a friendly interface.
• Strong customer service and support.

Cons

• The porting process is time-consuming and difficult. (G2, G2)
• The pricing could be more transparent. (G2)
• SMS experience leaves much to be desired. (G2)

Ratings and reviews

G2: 4.5/5 (405+ reviews)

Capterra: 4.6/5 (125+ reviews)

Pricing

SMS API

Outbound: $0.004/SMS

Outbound: $0.015/MMS

Voice API

Outbound: $0.0100/min

Inbound: $0.0055/min

Verify API

$0.0500/auth

$0.1500/call

Suitable for

Businesses seeking a basic, reliable communications solution provider that offers greater control over call routing and SMS features.

Why choose Plivo as a Bird alternative

What sets Plivo apart from Bird is its ability to offer robust compliance support, ensuring that businesses can easily adhere to critical regulations.

Our platform supports: 

• 10-digit long code (10DLC) assisted onboarding to all customers irrespective of their size and scale
• Sender ID registration.
• Toll-free verification.
• Distributed ledger technology (DLT) verification in India.

Plivo is ideal for companies with high messaging volume requirements. Strong customer support available through premium plans ensures that businesses receive the assistance. Our 99.99% uptime guarantee ensures that messages get delivered reliably. Plus, Plivo’s extensive documentation and developer-friendly APIs offer self-service options for those who prefer to troubleshoot independently.

Moreover, Plivo prioritizes communication security by focusing on fraud prevention and SMS pumping detection. Avoid unexpected charges and ensure your messages remain secure. Our default message redaction feature automatically removes sensitive information from your communications to help you maintain compliance while keeping your data safe.

With Plivo, you can communicate knowing that your business is well-protected.

Seeking a reliable, compliant, and budget-friendly messaging solution? Contact us to find out.

Manual ticket resolution seems simple, but behind the scenes, it's often a chaotic jumble of incessant tasks piling up and often just waiting to go wrong. 

According to data, the average overall resolution rate across industries is approximately 76.2%.

In addition, the Service Quality Measurement (SQM) Group reports that 20% to 30% of tickets require more than one interaction to resolve.

Plus, as your business scales up, critical issues often escalate with traditional ticketing, and customer requests increase day by day. You could find your customer service teams scrambling to categorize, prioritize, and assign hundreds of queries while simultaneously tracking responses and updating ticket statuses.

Here, automated ticket resolution works wonders. It delegates the repetitive yet crucial components of ticket resolution to AI and empowers your human agents to do more.

In this article, we go over how automated ticket resolution functions, its benefits over traditional ticketing resolution, and how to get started with the most suitable tool. 

What is automated ticket resolution?

Automated ticket resolution means using AI-driven ticketing systems and workflow software to manage customer requests from when a ticket is created to when it is resolved—with minimal or no human intervention. 

Key components

1. AI and ML: These ticket resolution systems use AI&ML algorithms to analyze and process tickets.
2. NLP: It enables the system to understand the context and intent of customer messages, allowing for more accurate ticket handling.
3. Automated workflows: The system can perform various tasks automatically, including:some text
   • Creating tickets
   • Labeling and sorting
   • Routing to appropriate agents and departments
   • Escalating and handing over complex issues to human agents when necessary
   • Following up with customers

How does automated ticket resolution work?

Did you know that after implementing automated ticketing, medium enterprises saw response times decrease from 1 day to 2 hours and resolution times from 3 days to 1 day? 

Let’s take a closer look at the key functions of automated ticket resolution that make it happen: 

1.Data collection and integration

Ticket resolution starts with consolidating all your data sources—emails, SMS, social media, web forms, calls, and live chats—on a single dashboard. 

To accomplish this, use an omnichannel customer service platform such as Plivo CX. With its unified agent desktop feature, the tool eliminates data silos, brings all incoming customer requests to a single window pane, and allows human agents to have a broader context of customer issues across channels—that too without having to switch between channels.   

2.Data preprocessing

AI-powered ticketing programs clean, sort, label, and categorize the data you collated into sections for easier analysis. This step also includes removing duplicates, correcting input errors, and standardizing structure to improve the accuracy of the subsequent processes.

3.NLP

After preprocessing, the system uses its NLP capabilities to analyze, interpret, and understand each customer’s request, intent, and urgency. Moreover, predictive and sentiment analysis is employed to accurately identify context, enhance categorization, and yield problem-solving responses.

4.Fast ticket categorization

Using insights from the ML analysis and NLP, the automated ticketing system sorts each request into predefined categories such as technical issues, billing inquiries, product return and shipping, etc. This allows for quick routing of each request to the appropriate channel. 

Categorization also facilitates seamless rerouting when customer service escalation is essential. With Plivo CX, you get to create custom workflows and automations using a simple drag-and-drop interface without having to code.

5.24/7 response

For low-level to medium-level queries that barely require sophisticated expertise, the system routes them to integrated AI-powered chatbots. 

To help you provide 24/7 customer service and handle maximum queries during peak seasons, Plivo CX provides OpenAI-powered self-service chatbots. You can train the bot using your company’s custom dataset to ensure accuracy and relevancy. Once deployed, the chatbot can automatically handle routine customer inquiries, freeing up your agents.

Plus, the tool also ensures brand consistency by seamlessly training AI agents to align with your company's unique voice and policies.

6.Agent assistance

For high-level tickets that the AI self-service bots cannot resolve, the automated ticket resolution system redirects or escalates them to a human agent of relevant expertise.

For example, by intuitively prioritizing urgent tickets to the most suitable agents, Plivo CX dramatically reduces response times and enhances customer satisfaction. 

7.Learning and improvement

Since AI ticketing systems leverage ML, they relentlessly learn from previous patterns and customer interactions, improving ticket categorization and enhancing the quality of responses over time.

With Plivo CX, you can maintain agility and freshness through effortless updates to your AI agents, allowing you to seamlessly adapt to new product launches, promotions, or policy changes.

Benefits of automated ticket resolution

Here are the key reasons why you must implement an automated ticket resolution system if you are looking to scale or streamline your CX operations:

1.Improves efficiency

An average company receives over 17,630 tickets monthly, with a 76.2% resolution rate. It means that out of every 100 tickets, you can only sort two-thirds of them.

The remaining one-third of queries are mostly unresolved due to complexities, such as missing information, errors by human agents, friction in cross-departmental collaboration, delayed support, or disjointed responses—issues that are common with traditional ticket resolution. 

However, when you embrace customer service automation, AI-powered ticketing handles repetitive and time-consuming tasks like triaging requests and labeling to accelerate resolution time. This is important as HubSpot data suggests that 90% of customers seek immediate response, ideally within 10 minutes.

2.Reduces errors

Customer support errors usually stem from inadequate data handling, human errors during analysis, and siloed datasets, which affect cross-departmental access to essential information for request handling.

Inadequate handling includes duplicate datasets, inaccurate or incomplete data, and decayed data across different operational channels.

When cross-departmental data-sharing barriers exist, customer support can become fragmented and inefficient. A common scenario is when a customer representative responds to a ticket already handled by another department.

Due to these disconnected support offerings, Salesforce found that 55% of consumers once felt like they were speaking with different departments instead of a company.

Automated ticket resolution eliminates such errors by delegating repetitive, error-prone tasks to AI. With NLP and ML, these systems identify and remove duplicate or inconsistent data and ensure a cleaner, more accurate dataset.

Plivo CX’s omnichannel platform solves disjointed departmental collaboration by centralizing customer data and streamlining data communication. This prevents double ticketing and helps your agents track every request from start to resolution.

3.Round-the-clock availability

In a CM survey, 60% of respondents expect round-the-clock availability. Three in four GenZ and Millennial consumers also highly appreciate this. But that’s almost impossible with traditional ticket resolution.

On the other hand, automated ticket resolution leverages AI to operate 24/7 and handle customer requests even without human intervention. Businesses can also engage and resolve queries even when employees are out of the office or closed for the day. 

4.Cost-effectiveness

The cost to set up a functional customer support team depends on your business size, the number of customer requests you handle daily, and your industry. For instance, a business with over a hundred requests daily would need about five to ten human agents to be fully operational.

According to IBM, customer support costs businesses about $1.3 trillion annually. Moreover, according to Glassdoor, a customer support agent in the US earns an average of $45,000 yearly. Imagine having to build a team of five or maybe ten.

Embracing automated ticket resolution helps solve this budget problem by reducing the need to acquire more human agents. 

A single AI-powered ticketing system can handle hundreds of requests simultaneously and still operate at its peak. Besides, Plivo CX’s self-service chatbots reduce customer support expenses by over 30% annually.

5.Scalability and proactive support 

The more your business grows, the more customer requests you have to handle. That’s unavoidable. However, AI-powered resolution systems and workflow programs have been built to handle large scaling. Unlike traditional ticket resolution approaches, your software grows with your business, often at no extra expense.

Plivo CX’s customer support platform also offers proactive support, which is essential for automated ticket resolution. It does this by leveraging predictive analysis, NLP, and machine learning to anticipate customer needs based on past interactions or data and trigger appropriate workflows.

Plivo CX: Deliver top-notch customer experience with intuitive automation 

Efficient automated ticket resolution relies on powerful workflows. Plivo CX provides a no-code/low-code platform to easily design these workflows, guiding tickets from creation to resolution with NLP analysis, auto-responses, and escalations.

Drag-and-drop workflows, personalized components, and seamless integrations ensure a tailored and optimized customer support journey.

Interestingly, you don’t need to be a technical whiz to set one up, here’s how: 

In addition to that, Plivo CX offers several features, such as:

• Unified communication: As noted before, you can manage all customer conversations across channels like email, voice, SMS, WhatsApp, and live chat from a single, agent-friendly platform
• Seamless integrations: Connect Plivo CX with your existing tools, including CRM, ERP, helpdesk, home-grown systems, and more
• AI-powered automation: Deploy smart chatbots to handle routine inquiries, freeing up agents to focus on personalized support
• Data-driven optimization: Track real-time analytics and generate custom reports to gain insights into customer interactions and agent performance
• Communication with media support: Enhance interactions with multimedia support, including images, videos, and documents
• Increased productivity: Streamline workflows with message templates, internal notes, and skills-based routing
• Comprehensive features: Leverage call recording, IVR, multi-language support, and robust security features for a complete solution

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Your business customer service team spends hours on the phone each day. They address customer concerns, answer questions, and provide support. And, while some important details are logged, other valuable insights, emotions, and recurring themes can easily be missed once the call ends.

Voice transcription captures all of these details for more informed decision-making.

When combined with voice intelligence—AI and machine learning techniques— call transcriptions can reveal patterns, track sentiment, and highlight actionable insights.

Let’s explore how voice transcription for customer analytics can help improve your user engagement strategies.

What is voice transcription?

Voice transcription, or audio-to-text conversion, is the process of converting audio from voice or video calls into written text, allowing businesses to store conversations in a searchable, readable format. Transcription can occur in real-time during a call or afterward from recorded audio.

Transcripts allow sales teams to quickly search for specific topics or scan through discussions. This capability streamlines their workflow and reduces the time spent on manual call reviews.

Additionally, these text-based records enhance agent monitoring and boost operational efficiency. Managers can review transcripts to gain clear insights into how employees handle customer interactions.

Types of voice transcriptions

Transcribed voice conversations offer valuable information from customer interactions. Getting these transcriptions can either be done manually or automatically. Here’s how these two types of transcription work and what they offer:

Manual transcriptions

Manual transcription involves listening to audio or video recordings and typing out everything that is heard. This do-it-yourself (DIY) method may appear cost-effective at first. However, it can quickly become time-consuming and labor-intensive, especially for those lacking transcription experience.

Additionally, manual transcription can be error-prone. These mistakes can affect the accuracy of the final transcript and result in misunderstandings in customer interactions.

Automatic transcriptions

Automatic voice transcription uses speech recognition technology to convert spoken words into written text. Unlike manual transcription, this method is much faster, as the software processes the audio in real time or within minutes, depending on the file length.

Plivo’s Voice API improves the transcription process with automatic speech recognition (ASR) via its GetInput XML Element. This feature enables businesses to capture user input through both speech and dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) inputs.

When a call participant speaks, Plivo transcribes their words and sends the text to a specific action URL. This transcript is used by your application to trigger an instant response to the customer’s request. 

For example, if a caller says, “I’d like to speak to a representative,” Plivo immediately transcribes this statement and sends it to a URL like https://yourapp.com/handle_request. Your application can then respond by transferring the call to an available agent or providing relevant options based on the caller’s request.

Plivo’s ASR can capture partial speech recognition results in real time, making live conversations more dynamic and responsive. Plus, transcriptions are instantly available to your applications, helping you act on customer feedback right away.

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How businesses use voice transcriptions for analytics

Voice transcription services can analyze high volumes of customer interactions to extract valuable insights. This data is a valuable resource for improving customer satisfaction and internal workflows. 

Here are a few ways businesses are using voice transcriptions for customer analytics.

Sales-driven customer insights

Voice transcription captures key details from customer conversations that might otherwise get lost. Sales calls, courtesy follow-ups, and support inquiries offer different insights, helping businesses better understand their customers.

For example, sales calls gives you a direct look into customer needs, questions, and pain points. You can assess their interest levels, identify upsell opportunities, and even spot objections that come up frequently.

Transcriptions from support calls, on the other hand, can reveal product concerns or unmet needs, which could lead to product development opportunities.

With these transcriptions, businesses can identify patterns in customer behavior and sentiment. This analysis allows you to fine-tune your sales and marketing strategies to better meet customer needs.

Customer experience improvement

Call transcripts provide a detailed record of interactions essential for improving the customer experience.

These transcripts make it easy to identify recurring issues, monitor how well agents handle customer concerns, and uncover areas for improvement in your service. 

For example, transcripts from support calls can help you identify where common pain points arise. If multiple customers mention similar problems, you can quickly address those concerns, ensuring they don’t escalate into larger issues.

This efficiency is further enhanced with AI-powered transcription software like Plivo, which offers benefits such as:

• Extensive language support: Use speech recognition for 27 major languages and their regional variants.
• Speech adaptation with hints: Improve accuracy with custom words and phrases, ensuring better recognition of proper nouns, homophones, and industry-specific terms.
• Prebuilt models: Choose from a range of ready-to-use IVR configurations, saving time when setting up voice systems.
• Simultaneous input detection: Allow customers to interact using either voice or keypad input, offering more flexibility with prompts like, “Press 1 or say ‘yes’”.
• Profanity filter: Automatically mask inappropriate language in transcriptions to maintain professionalism.
• Advanced end-of-speech detection: Detect when a speaker has finished talking for smoother conversation transitions.
• Interim transcription results: Receive transcription updates in real time, reducing response times and allowing for quicker interactions.

Legal purposes

Voice transcriptions play an important role in ensuring transparency and accountability in business communications. They provide an accurate record of conversations between parties, which can be valuable in legal matters where agreements may be contested or misunderstood.

Call transcriptions can show that businesses are following industry regulations and internal policies. This is particularly important in regulated fields like finance, healthcare, or telecommunications, where businesses must maintain high standards of accountability and transparency.

However, before using voice transcriptions for legal purposes, check the privacy laws in your state or country regarding call recording and transcribing.

Laws around recording conversations and using those recordings vary widely. Some areas require all parties’ consent, while others may allow recording with only one person’s agreement. Additionally, regulations often specify how recorded conversations can be stored, shared, and used, making it essential to understand the legal requirements in each location.

Personalization with sentiment analysis

Voice transcripts from sales and support calls can add a personalized touch to customer interactions.

Techniques like sentiment analysis offer insights into customer preferences and emotions, giving businesses a deeper understanding of what resonates with their audience. With this knowledge, companies can tailor their responses, enhancing the overall experience and fostering stronger connections with customers.

For instance, in a travel planning service, you might discover that words like "adventure" and "explore" spark excitement in customers, evoking thoughts of fun and spontaneity. On the other hand, terms like "schedule" or "itinerary" might create stress, as they can imply rigid planning rather than a relaxed, enjoyable experience. Missing these subtle customer reactions can limit the impact of your marketing and sales messages. Voice transcription captures these emotional nuances, allowing you to adjust your language to better resonate with your audience.

Call intent discovery

Call intent discovery helps businesses understand why customers are calling—to seek support, ask for information, or provide feedback,

Voice transcriptions assist in intent discovery through tools that use natural language processing (NLP). This technology automatically scans transcribed conversations for specific keywords, phrases, and patterns that indicate the customer’s intent.

For example, phrases like “I need help with…” signal a support-related call, while “Can you tell me more about…” might indicate an interest in product information.

Understanding call intent allows businesses to

• Improve call routing: Once the call intent has been identified through transcription, businesses can automatically direct customers to the appropriate team or resource. For instance, a customer with a billing issue can be quickly routed to the billing department without having to go through multiple transfers. 
• Enhance support: Businesses can identify and proactively address recurring issues, leading to faster resolutions and fewer customer complaints.
• Make data-driven decisions: Identifying trends in call intents allows enterprises to make better business decisions. This approach ensures that customer feedback directly influences product improvements, ultimately enhancing customer satisfaction.

Enhanced agent performance

Voice transcription lets managers closely review conversations, analyzing how agents handle tasks like problem-solving and dealing with unhappy customers. 

Reviewing the transcript enables managers to provide precise, data-driven feedback on employees’ strengths and areas for improvement, moving beyond subjective impressions. This approach helps managers focus on measurable insights, fostering more targeted coaching and professional growth.

For example, a manager might focus on:

• Language: Was the agent professional?
• Problem-solving: How well did they resolve the issue?
• Product knowledge: Did they show strong knowledge of the company’s products?

Transcriptions also highlight knowledge gaps. If several agents struggle with the same issues, it may indicate the need for extra training. Incorrect terminology or failure to follow protocols can also be spotted and corrected.

Managers can then design personalized training, ensuring agents are prepared to confidently handle different customer inquiries.

Better accessibility

Voice transcriptions make information more accessible to individuals with hearing impairments. This written record ensures that everyone, regardless of hearing ability, has access to essential information shared in audio formats.

For businesses, transcriptions demonstrate a commitment to inclusivity and accessibility, allowing for more equitable communication.

When a person with a hearing impairment calls a contact center, the audio of the conversation is captured and processed in real time. Speech recognition technology converts the spoken words into text, which is then displayed on the caller’s screen. This allows the individual to read along as the customer service representative speaks, facilitating a clear and engaging dialogue.

Unlock customer insights with Plivo’s voice transcription features

Plivo’s Voice API and audio streaming features make it easy to connect with AI-driven transcription and sentiment analysis tools. This flexibility lets businesses customize their solutions, facilitating improved customer interactions with efficient automation.

With Plivo, you can automate call quality checks to get helpful insights. These insights boost agent performance and customer satisfaction, making it easier to spot and fix issues quickly.

The Voice API also supports ASR using the Record API or Record XML element. 

Plivo provides accurate transcriptions at affordable rates, especially for English-language audio. Whether you need it for quality control, compliance, or personalized service, Plivo’s technology can handle your voice-to-text conversation needs smoothly.

Contact us to learn more about how Plivo can optimize your voice transcription processes and help you deliver a better customer experience.

If you are running an SMS marketing campaign, the stakes are always high, and it has to bring you the maximum ROI. 

To make sure you leave no quarter to things going wrong, you must monitor the SMS marketing conversion rate to ensure your efforts bring the expected results. 

In this post, we will check how to calculate SMS marketing conversion rate and also improve it for the best results. 

What is the SMS marketing conversion rate, and what are the factors influencing it?

SMS marketing conversion rate is a metric that tracks if consumers took the expected action upon receiving the SMS. It could be making a purchase or signing up for newsletters or more. 

Factors that influence SMS marketing conversion rate include the following:

• Relevance of messages
• Effective targeting to reach the audience most likely to convert 
• Appropriate timing of the message
• Clear call to action in the message

What is an average SMS marketing conversion rate?

In 2023, eCommerce brands worldwide observed a 7.6% click rate and a 0.13% conversion rate on average. This positive change resulted in a 9.4% growth in orders. 

Therefore, eCommerce brands increased their SMS marketing budgets and sent 57.9% more SMS campaigns compared to 2022. 

How to calculate SMS marketing conversion rate

Theoretically speaking, you can calculate the SMS marketing conversion rate (CVR) by calculating the number of conversions and dividing it by the number of messages delivered. That makes the SMS marketing CVR formula to be:

SMS Marketing CVR = (Number of conversions/Number of messages delivered)*100

But it’s tough to keep track of this number manually. A better solution is to integrate your marketing platform with CRM or the eCommerce platform to automatically calculate the numbers. 

For instance, the all-in-one customer engagement platform Plivo CX easily integrates with your Shopify store and tracks the open rate, click rate, conversion rate, and revenue generated by the campaign. 

7 ways to maximize SMS marketing conversion rate

Now that we have the basics cleared, here are seven practical tips to increase SMS marketing conversion rate:

1. Segment audience

One of the simplest ways to improve SMS marketing conversions is to segment your consumers based on demographics, interests, and more. 

Segmentation gives you more insights into your consumers and helps you tailor the message accordingly. After segmentation, you can send personalized messages to specific consumers. It improves the chances of engagement and conversion. 

Tip: Use an SMS marketing automation platform like Plivo CX for a trouble-free segmentation process. It automatically divides users into segments based on key attributes, such as demographics, browsing activity, online behavior, etc. 

Plus, you can send more relevant messages targeting different user segments with Plivo CX. 

2. Optimize messages

After segmenting the consumers for better targeting, the next step to increase conversions would be optimizing messages. It can be done by:

• Keep the message concise
• Use simple and direct language
• Make the message engaging by using graphics
• Add a clear and compelling call to action

Tip: Use generative AI to your advantage to create multiple versions of a campaign and shortlist the best one. 

Plivo CX comes with an inbuilt Copywriter AI that instantly crafts campaign messages for you. You just need to fill out the form with your campaign objectives, goal, parameters, timing, urgency, expected tone, and voila! 

3. Optimize timing and frequency

Apart from optimizing messages, identifying the optimal timing is also important. Send messages to your consumers when they are most likely to be active. Also, identify the right timing by analyzing past campaigns, open rates, and consumer data. 

However, choosing the right frequency of messages is also important. Too many messages are spam, and too few are not effective enough. Hit the right balance for the best results. 

Tip: Identifying patterns in data manually is tedious. Here is where AI can come to your aid again. Plivo AI assistant also suggests the right time to send messages by analyzing past data. 

4. Test campaigns

Once you have optimized messages and frequency, it’s time for testing. Run different variations of optimized messages and gather metrics. 

With these results, you can check what’s working and what’s not. Once you have the data, promote the campaigns that are giving expected returns. 

Tip: Plivo CX automatically tracks the important metrics: delivered rate, open rate, click rate, conversion rate, and revenue. This data allows you to allocate budgets to campaigns with higher SMS marketing conversion rates. 

5. Create customer journeys

SMS supports every stage of the consumer life cycle and not just conversion. It helps in the initial acquisition phase, onboarding, engagement, support, and building long-term brand advocates. 

But how do you plan for the entire consumer lifecycle? A marketing platform that designs consumer journeys will automate the entire process.

Tip: Plivo CX allows you to design the entire consumer journey. You can set up trigger events and deliver the right message at the right time based on the consumer's activity. 

For instance, you can set up a trigger event to send a welcome message right when they sign up or send an abandoned cart message if they leave the cart without making a purchase. 

6. Run different types of campaigns

Create different types of campaigns to keep the customers engaged and support the entire customer journey. Some common campaigns are:

• Cart abandonment: These campaigns help to convert back the customers who are having second thoughts. It could contain a special discount, a free shipping offer, or an inventory alert.
• Flash deals: These campaigns provide enticing offers for a limited period, creating fear of missing out (FOMO) in consumers.
• Exclusive deals: These campaigns are exclusive to SMS subscribers, providing a special discount code or early access to a new collection.
• Seasonal and holiday discounts: Consumers have a holiday shopping budget, and these campaigns directly tap into that budget.
• Win-back deals: Lastly, offering deals to consumers who haven't shopped with you in a while could be great to win them back.

A marketing automation platform can help you design all these campaigns based on consumer behavior and actions. 

Tip: As suggested previously, Plivo CX works end-to-end for Shopify consumers. You can run different campaigns based on their action and purchase history. 

7. Integrate with other channels

Lastly, integrate SMS with other marketing channels to provide the most consistent brand experience to your consumers. By integrating platforms, you can deliver the message on the channel where it works best. 

For instance, if you find flash deals working best on SMS, plan those campaigns on SMS. 

Another example is if you find cart abandonment to be working best on email. Deliver those over email. You have all platforms integrated into one, creating a huge data powerhouse for better personalization for all campaigns. 

Tip: Plivo CX serves as an omnichannel platform that combines all common marketing channels: SMS, MMS, WhatsApp, and email (coming soon). It establishes an integrated system for all your marketing efforts and consumer data. 

This integration lays the groundwork for improved personalization, making all campaigns more compatible with the platform. 

Run effective SMS marketing campaigns with Plivo CX

To sum it up, Plivo CX can be a great asset to your SMS marketing efforts, as it supports the entire customer journey by:

• Gathering customer data
• Segmenting based on key attributes
• Designing campaigns with AI support
• Delivering campaigns with an inbuilt carrier network
• And gathering metrics

Plivo CX also works end-to-end for Shopify consumers with all the necessary features required to boost conversion. 

The best part is, Plivo CX leverages Plivo’s proprietary premium carrier network that lets you send personalized messages to 220+ countries and territories at an affordable rate. 

You can send a text message in the US for as little as $0.0065 from Plivo compared to the $0.0150 /SMS cost of competitors. As a result, you can slash SMS costs by 70% and triple your marketing ROI.

Sign up for a quick demo now!

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. What is the conversion rate for SMS marketing?

In 2023, eCommerce brands worldwide observed an average 7.6% click rate and a 0.13% conversion rate. 

2. What is the success rate of SMS marketing?

In 2023, eCommerce brands worldwide observed an average 7.6% click rate and a 0.13% success rate. 

3. How to calculate SMS conversion rate? 

You can calculate SMS marketing CVR by taking the number of conversions and dividing it by the number of messages delivered. 

SMS marketing CVR formula= (Number of conversions/Number of messages delivered)*100

4. How do you calculate ROI for SMS marketing?

SMS ROI is calculated by dividing the profit of the campaign against the total investment made in it. A simple SMS marketing ROI formula for a marketing campaign is: 

ROI = ((Total revenue- Campaign cost)/Campaign cost)*100.

5. What is the CTR of SMS marketing?

In 2023, eCommerce brands worldwide observed an average 7.6% clickthrough rate (CTR) and a 0.13% conversion rate. 

6. Is SMS marketing expensive?

No, SMS marketing is not expensive if you choose the right marketing platform. By using Plivo CX, you can send a text message in the US for as little as $0.0065 compared to the $0.0150 /SMS cost of competitors.

7. How can I increase my CTR in SMS?

Seven ways to increase click rate are:

1. Segment audience

2. Optimize messages

3. Optimize timing and frequency

4. Test campaigns

5. Create customer journeys

6. Run exclusive deals

7. Integrate with other channels

8. What is a good SMS click rate?

In 2023, eCommerce brands worldwide observed an average 7.6% click rate and a 0.13% conversion rate. 

9. What is the cost of SMS?

The cost of SMS depends on the provider. With Plivo CX, you can send a text message in the US for as little as $0.0065 compared to the $0.0150 /SMS cost of competitors.