December 04, 2025

From Prototype to Production: How Perk Built a Voice AI Agent That Makes 10,000 Calls a Week

54 minutes

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

...more

By Teresa Torres