Situation
The challenge for CabCALL was finding an IVR solution that would be scalable and allow for redundancy and provide a cost effective high quality connection between a legacy PBX and the IVR without the need for expensive proprietary network or telephony cards. Some of the other considerations included geographical separation of the IVR and PBX, but also the overall cost of the project as well as the time it would take to go live.

Part of the problem was that proprietary IVR systems usually require all endpoints to be proprietary and are prohibitively expensive in terms of hardware and recurring licensing to maintain. Rapid, development is usually consultancy based and done by the IVR developer’s professional services team. The customer usually does not have access to the source code and cannot make incremental changes or upgrades without retaining the professional services team.

Solution
Pronexus VBVoice Toolkit with Host Media Processing (HMP) offered CabCALL the ability to develop a customized IVR taxi booking solution that can be integrated to new or existing Telco environments. It also provide an industry standard network-based modular solution where automated IVR, ASR and TTS work together using VOIP thus eliminating the need of specializing telephony hardware. It can be built in-house, rather than have expensive third parties build one for them. This saved money by allowing them to utilize existing technical resources to develop their IVR own system. Once built, they would own the rights to the source code and could maintain and upgrade it whenever required.

CabCALL was able to develop a customized IVR solution within a month thanks to Pronexus’ VBVoice IVR Toolkit. This rapid development allowed them to secure investment and pre-sign customers. Pronexus integrated seamlessly with Dialogic HMP equipment and VBVoices’ VB 6.0, C# and VB.NET support allowed CabCALL’s developers to leverage existing skills in application development resulting in a short learning curve and rapid development cycle.

Now, the CabCALL IVR taxi booking solution, (developed using Pronexus VBVoice Toolkits) is able to play customized greetings depending upon the number the customer called. This enabled CabCALL to adopt a subscription based model of IVR services. Customized greeting are played representing the appropriate cab company, and calls are automatically routed to the taxi company based upon area code of inbound callers, thus maximizing revenue and minimizing time lost dealing with customers in non-serviceable areas. The Pronexus VBVoice solution was so successful that, over the next three years,

CabCALL plans to move all of their existing sites to the Pronexus VBVoice IVR solution and have standardized all new development processes utilizing VBVoice.

Benefits
Using Pronexus VBVoice w/HMP support significantly reduced CabCALL’s initial investment and time-to-market. It allows for future upgrades and integration with third-party phone systems thus opening up the market for CabCALL beyond Australia and existing telephony equipment. This saves money and maximizes ROI on an ongoing basis by using VOIP and utilizing existing network infrastructure and development staff. It allows them to use the experience they have gained with this project to make customized IVR’s for new markets and diversify their services. Scalability of licenses and redundant servers ensure the CabCALL’s IVRs provide maximum uptime and can handle increased capacity. This also eliminates any downtime from single node failure or maintenance. Brand recognition of Dialogic HMP and Pronexus VBVoice ensures that they can pitch their solution to companies with existing legacy telecom equipment and overcome technical objections to a prospective sale.