At three o'clock on a Sunday morning, as the city starts to slumber, it's rush hour in Premier Cabs' call centre as people ring for a ride home after a big night on the town.
The humble telephone is the lifeblood of any taxi company so, when the system at Sydney's Premier Cabs reached its used by date, communications manager Paul Kelly decided it was time to look to Voice over IP.
With a fleet of around 1000 vehicles, including standard cabs, MaxiCabs and luxury Prestige Service taxis, Premier Cabs takes more than 3.6 million bookings annually at the company's 20-seat call centre.
Voice over IP transmits telephone calls over data networks rather than telephone lines, allowing users to avoid long distance call charges, but Premier Cabs' call centre mostly handles inbound calls from local customers.
As such, the attraction of Voice over IP for Kelly was not the lure cheap phone calls but the flexibility it offers in terms of call management and business continuity should disaster strike.
Attending a business continuity seminar was ''a bit of an eye opener'' to the problems Premier Cabs would face should it be forced to evacuate its call centre, Kelly says.
“You think evacuation means we've got to go out of the building for a couple of hours or so but, when you think about it, something else could happen and the whole building might not exist any more.
“We've had a couple of incidents where we've had to move out of the building, when there's been smoke or other issues, but never a total disaster - yet that's the kind of thing we're thinking of. If that does happen, where do we go?” he says.
“Up and down the east coast of Australia there's about 30 cab companies that have all got the same problem; what happens if their communications centre goes down? As it is you have to have a warm site that you can go to, which means replicating all the hardware and infrastructure including the telephone land lines. We're trying to move away from that, and Voice over IP technology will allow us to quickly and easily redirect calls in an emergency.”
The ease of call recording, for training and quality control, was another driver for Premier Cabs to embrace Voice over IP.
After putting together a detailed requirements document, Premier Cabs went out to market last year. Without going to tender, it chose Sydney systems integrator NSC to replace its ageing Avaya Lucent PABX switchboard which Avaya no longer supported.
The rollout
In its place, NSC installed an Avaya S8710 IP Multi-Connect System - consisting of two Intel Xeon servers running Red Hat Linux. They supply 99.999 percent guaranteed uptime for the telephone system and are backed by two Uninterruptible Power Supplies, designed to kick in should the power fail.
The system took around six working days to install, with less than five minutes down time during the handover.
The flexibility of the Avaya system allows it to offer both Voice over IP and traditional PABX features. This was vital to Premier Cabs because, while the Avaya system was installed in February, the taxi company is yet to switch over to Voice over IP due to the need to integrate with its existing call booking system.
The computerised booking system from Raywood Communications is integrated with the telephone system at the handset level, requiring customised handsets.
Once that computer integration is done at the server level, Premier Cabs will be able to upgrade to Voice over IP telephone handsets.
Avaya's sale of Voice over IP handsets surpassed those of traditional handsets 12 to 18 months ago, but the company realises Voice over IP needs to offer more than just cheap calls to continue growing, says Avaya South Pacific head of convergence practise Mark Duncan.
“We're beyond just the toll bypass savings of yesteryear, such as companies with offices in different states looking to cut call costs. What's actually happened is it's a more competitive market, carriage providers such as Telstra and Optus have cut their rates so those kind of savings have all but disappeared. Carriage is very cheap these days, especially for the large corporates - they have very good buying people and negotiate very good rates,” Duncan says.
“In order to drive Voice over IP we've had to look for more business benefits, such as the improved communication and collaboration it delivers. IP telephony and the IP architecture lends itself very well to business continuity. Because of the single server environment where you control everything from one site with remote gateways, you can then have a backup server in any of your remote sites with a copy of the data from the main site and it's very easy to reconfigure should disaster strike.”
While the need to integrate with the Raywood booking system has delayed Premier Cabs' move to Voice over IP, the fact the taxi company could still use the new Avaya equipment with its old telephone handsets illustrates a strength of Avaya products, Duncan says.
“We [Avaya] protected the existing investment and were able to deliver these additional functions through the IP-enabled system. That was phase one. Phase two is to role out Voice IP handsets and move the computer integration from the handsets to the Application Enablement Services server that we've included in the solution for Premier.”
Such complications are to be expected in an industry that has always been quick to embrace new technology, Craig Neil, the managing director at integrator responsible for the rollout, NSC.
As systems integrator, NSC has found the level of technology used in the taxi industry to be incredibly high. “There's a lot of integration and their contact centres are even more complex than some of the major banks,” Neil says. “Technology is a certainly competitive edge in this industry.
Premier Cabs is one of the smaller taxi groups but the move to Voice over IP has allowed it to integrated the same technology as the bigger guys.”
The decision to compile a detailed requirements document before talking to vendors is becoming a common approach amongst those looking to implement Voice over IP, Neil says. “I think it's a clever way of doing things, first you define your basic business requirements, then some IT requirements and then you go and talk to the market. These requirements obviously evolve as you learn more about Voice over IP.”
“Some organisations do it in two steps, they do an information session and talk to all the major players and put an information document together and then from that they'll put a tender together. Others, like Premier, are just doing it all in one process.”
NSC did a complete redesign of Premier Cabs' contact centre from a technology stand point, bringing in professional services and project managers working closely with Premier Cabs to understand its business. This mostly involved coping with differ call patterns at different times of day.
“We see the services as equally important to the products, these days about 40 cents in every dollar is spent on services,” Neil says.
“It's like buying a new software system - you can buy the best possible technology but if it's not integrated properly then it's not worth buying.”
While Premier Cabs elected to host its Voice over IP equipment at its Granville headquarters, a growing number of clients are electing to have it hosted and maintained offsite, Neil says.
“In the last 12 months we've seen a migration to put the technology into data centres and hosted centres - in fact we've got a data centre ourselves and we're starting to do a bit of that. We're building that part of our business because we see that as a model moving forward, a growth model,” he says.
“A lot of people are looking to push all of this out. Companies are getting frustrated - the directors and leaders are saying they're not really interested in running IT and, where they can, they'll outsource it and make it someone else's responsibility.”
With the new Avaya equipment onsite, even before the switch to Voice over IP, Premier Cabs has access to a range of new features such as EC500 or “extension to cellular”. EC500 allows a mobile phone to act like a desk phone so users can make and receive land line calls on their mobile phone.
Early benefits
Another early benefit of the new system is the ability to record calls using a Verint call recording solution connected to the Avaya Application Enablement Services server. The nature of Voice over IP calls offers far more flexibility when it comes to recording and storing calls.
“The telephone recording component now it makes it a lot easier for us to introduce a quality program,” Kelly says, “and it's once of the areas where we're making some cost savings compared to the old system.”
Kelly realises the Premier Cabs is only scraping the surface of Voice of IP's potential and already has big plans for the technology. Another area where significant savings could be made is in the use of Voice over IP via radio to talk to drivers - a process which Kelly estimates currently costs around $130,000 a year. Integration with the Raywood dispatch system will again pose a challenge here.
“Another idea we've always tossed about is telecommuting for call centre operators,” Kelly says.
“It difficult to ring people on short notice who live far away and expect them to come in. If we could just ring them and say ''look, can you help us out for three hours”, as long as they've got broadband they can come in through a VPN and we add their phone as an extension off the switch.”
In a highly competitive industry, it's such thinking that will allow Premier Cabs to stay competitive against the larger players, he says.
“I think most taxi companies are up near the front when it comes to embracing new technology - we were probably the first in Sydney to use GPS for actual dispatch rather than just driver safety,” Kelly says.
“I guess it's a competitive edge, you've got to have something the other bloke doesn't have.”
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