Guests

Steven Payne, Product Manager, Perk
Gabriel Stock, Senior Engineering Manager, Perk
Philipe Steiff, Senior Software Engineer, Perk

What we cover in this episode

How Perk's team identified an AI use case by connecting prior experimentation with a real operational problem
Why they chose Make.com for prototyping—and shipped to production without touching backend code
The evolution from a single prompt to structured conversation stages (IVR handling, booking confirmation, payment request)
How breaking up the agent's task dramatically improved reliability
Building two eval systems: classification for success rates and LLM-as-judge for conversational behavior
Why the team still listens to calls manually even with automated metrics
The challenge of prompt engineering for voice: numbers, booking references, and text-to-speech markup
Lessons learned from expanding to German (prompts in native language improve results)
How this project uncovered other operational problems they didn't know existed

Resources & Links

Perk
Make.com – No-code automation platform used for the prototype
Twilio – Voice/telephony provider
11 Labs – Text-to-speech provider (used in early experiments)

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to the Team 01:54 Understanding PERK's Mission 02:59 Challenges in Travel Booking 07:27 AI Solutions for Customer Care 09:52 Prototyping with AI and Voice 17:00 Implementing AI in Production 25:51 Learning Through Trial and Error 26:40 Prompting Challenges and Solutions 27:58 Iterating on Prompts and Evaluations 30:08 Scaling and Production Challenges 32:43 Advanced Evaluation Techniques 35:32 Real-World Applications and Success 49:07 Future Directions and Expansion 53:53 Conclusion and Team Reflections