AAA of Arizona

LumenVox speech technology and InfinityCTI power Avaya-based IVR solution for AAA

AAA Arizona, Inc. is an affiliate club of the American Automobile Association. It offers a variety of automotive, insurance, and travel services to almost a million members in the state of Arizona.

In 2010, AAA Arizona issued an RFP looking for an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system that automates membership renewal, card replacement, and credit card payment services over the phone.

Participating vendors were asked to demonstrate extensive experience with call routing, VUI design, speech automation, service-oriented architecture integration, payment card industry (PCI) compliance, user experience optimization, and cross-functional project management. After a careful evaluation, AAA Arizona selected San Diego-based InfinityCTI to develop the system and operate it as a hosted service.

InfinityCTI, which has worked closely with Avaya and its partners since 1996 to provide IVR, CTI, CMS, and PBX development, chose the LumenVox Text-to-Speech (TTS) Server to meet the TTS needs of the solution.

"We were impressed with the realistic and natural sounding speech provided by the LumenVox TTS," said InfinityCTI CEO Frank Guthrie. "Coupled with the carrier-grade, scalable, and highly reliable LumenVox architecture, it was an easy decision to go with LumenVox for this project."

The IVR, running on Avaya Aura® Experience Portal (AAEP), uses speech recognition and TTS to interact with callers in English and Spanish. Transactions are handled in real-time across multiple data systems, like Authorize.Net for credit card payments, and AAA's backend system for membership status and account information. The application is capable of automating all membership renewal, card replacement, and credit card payment functions.

Calls are routed to live agents only when a caller drops out of the IVR due to special situations, like repeated recognition errors, when the system is unable to find an account, or when a caller does not have all of the required information.

The system went live in December, 2010, less than 6 months after awarding the contract. It has been working reliably ever since. The IVR has decreased the load on live call center agents, providing a solid return on investment to AAA Arizona, which is happy with its performance, from call completion rate to PCI compliance.

"InfinityCTI is a true business partner for AAA Arizona, with vested interest in our success," said Chuck Giglio, Manager for Member Services & Fulfillment at AAA Arizona.

Avaya Aura® Experience Portal (AAEP) acts as the voice platform for the application. AAEP is Avaya's latest generation of its award-winning Avaya Voice Portal. It helps organizations automate and centrally manage multimedia self-service and IVR applications.

InfinityCTI deployed AAEP and LumenVox in two hosting centers, one in San Diego and the other in Phoenix. The software was deployed with full fail-over support, both within and across each center.

LumenVox, which is a member of both the Avaya DevConnect and Select Product Programs, has been working with both InfinityCTI and Avaya for many years on a broad range of projects.

"It's always great to work with a company like InfinityCTI that is able to build, deploy, and manage a solution built on Avaya infrastructure to deliver a solid win for the customer," said LumenVox CEO David Rich.