Cloud-Based Visual IVR Provider - Jacada Embraces MongoDB

Cloud-Based Visual IVR Software Migrates Off Relational Database to Take Advantage of MongoDB’s ‘Flexibility, High Availability and Ease of Operation’

Jacada, the customer experience company has powers its award winning cloud-based Visual Interactive Voice Response (IVR) application with MongoDB. The IVR is used by leading network and telephony organizations including Cisco and Avaya.

To achieve the scale, flexibility and high availability demanded by the application, Jacada migrated from an on-premise relational database to MongoDB hosted in the cloud.

Nearly 90% of customer service calls result in a ‘robo-voice’ based system. These voice IVRs have inherent limitations - endless menu trees, confusing options, poor voice recognition and limited ability to collect information.

To address this, Jacada developed the Visual IVR application that allows customers to provide input, or review data, such as verifying banking details or routing a complaint to the correct department - all from their smartphone. By introducing a supplementary visual interface, Visual IVR allows customers to easily navigate these options.

IVR improves the customer experience by providing service-reps complete visibility into a customer’s journey, so no information needs to be repeated. The technology vastly outperformed conventional systems and has won numerous accolades including Product of the Year 2014 at the Call Center World Forum.

Dan Weil, CTO at Jacada, said, "For IVR to be a success, we needed a database that could scale to handle the massive data volumes we work with and allow easy development for rapid product transformation. For this application we could not afford any downtime at all. MongoDB's resilient and reliable architecture was invaluable to ensure service continuity on commodity hardware.”

“The transition from working on traditional databases to working on MongoDB was seamless, even for those developers who only had experience with relational databases,” explained Weil. “There was a limited learning curve and the team quickly achieved impressive results. We went from concept to a released product in less than a year. MongoDB was tested and compared to a number of databases but we found that MongoDB fits our requirements perfectly and it clearly had better performance at scale.”

Joe Morrissey, Vice President EMEA at MongoDB, said, "Visual IVR is a prime example of how modern applications are being built on MongoDB, not on relational databases. High expectations of consumers combined with the demands of complex unstructured data, means a better solution is necessary if companies are to deliver on their promise.”

"MongoDB was designed to make it easier for engineering teams to create applications that have massive scale, always-on operation and support a variety of data. Jacada’s team has executed its product development perfectly by building a next generation application that is winning awards and changing its industry. This just simply would not have been possible with traditional relational databases,” added Morrissey.