Travel, Hospitality
Airlines, hotels, car rental companies, and travel agencies are among the PSS customers in the Travel & Hospitality industry.
Migrating Multiple Legacy IVR Systems to Single VoiceXML Platform
Two major US-based airlines were in the process of combining their IT infrastructure following a well-publicized merger. They called on PSS to help them migrate from four different legacy IVR platforms to a single IP-based next-generation VoiceXML platform that could be standardized across all their operations in multiple locations. The customer selected a Holly IP-IVR, which natively supports a SIP-based VoIP telephony interface. They planned to use existing Cisco gateways and middle-tier routers to perform the necessary conversion from a Rockwell TDM-based telephony switch to VoIP/SIP for the Holly IP-IVR.
As the planned deployment date approached, PSS completed the installation of the Holly IP-IVR systems on time and within budget. Only days before the "go live" date, the schedule was put in jeopardy because the customer's gateway vendor was still unable to correctly interface with Holly's IP-IVR via standards-based SIP. PSS quickly brought in the FlexxGate Media Gateway and was able to take a call from their Rockwell switch to the Holly IP-IVR within one hour of the system arriving on-site.
The customer made a last-minute decision to forego using their existing gateways and deployed FlexxGate instead. FlexxGate is now taking over a million calls a month across multiple locations for the merged airlines, and has experienced zero system downtime since going live in January 2007.
Custom IVR Solution Does Number Translation for a Large Hotel
A large Vegas hotel wanted to use its Nortel Meridian CS1000 to handle room-to-room calls, but they needed unusual dialing plans to accommodate room numbers that ranged from three to five digits. Their CS1000 could not be configured to route calls properly with the desired plans and calling rules, so for years they had been completing room-to-room calls through a very old IVR system as a workaround. Over time, the old IVR's analog line interface cards had been failing and could not be replaced- gradually reducing the system's capacity.
With a major event taking place at the hotel in ten days, the current system would not be able to handle the skyrocketing room-to-room traffic the event would generate. The customer needed a new solution deployed very quickly.
Instead of looking at this as an IVR function, PSS suggested they look at this as a translation between legacy TDM and their CS1000 telephony interface. When a guest places a call, the CS1000 routes all room-to-room calls to the FlexxGate. FlexxGate collects the dialed room number using in-band signaling and translates this number to the room's actual phone number that maps to the CS1000 dialing plan. FlexxGate then performs a hookflash transfer, releasing the call back to the CS1000 for routing to the appropriate room.
Within five days, PSS configured and deployed a FlexxGate to solve the customer's problem- for less than 20% of the cost of other solutions they considered.