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