A Twilio-Powered Solution for Libraries: Central Library Consortium's Voice Broadcasting App

A Twilio-Powered Solution for Libraries: Central Library Consortium's Voice Broadcasting App

Learning, exploring, questioning and doing are all big parts of our culture at Twilio, and there are few places that promote this approach to life as much as our local libraries. Libraries bring people and ideas together, and make knowledge accessible to everyone. Nearly three-quarters of all U.S. libraries provide the only source of free access to computers and the Internet in their communities. So we were delighted to learn that libraries around the country are building communications solutions on the Twilio platform that are more flexible, easier to use and cheaper than what the libraries used before. In these tough economic times, every bit of savings helps. We’ll be highlighting some library case studies on the blog, starting with Ohio’s Central Library Consortium.

The Central Library Consortium

The Challenges of Voice Broadcasting Hardware

The Consortium had been using an on-premises voice broadcasting service to notify patrons when materials they’d requested became available and to deliver overdue notices. But the automated phone system was unsatisfactory and the vendor required the libraries to spend as much as $10,000 for an upgrade that would provide the software fixes the Consortium required.

Wes Osborn, the CLC’s Systems Administrator, decided to look for voice broadcasting software that was flexible, easily customizable and could scale to handle more than half a million voice notifications a year. Because a significant number of the member libraries’ patrons lacked reliable access to the Internet, the CLC wanted to make sure the new system could dependably deliver the information they needed to any kind of phone.

The Cloud Communications Solution

After discovering Twilio’s Cloud Communication Platform, Osborn

“Using Twilio’s APIs to place the calls was the easiest part of the entire development process,” Fields said.

In the first month, the Consortium delivered 21,000 calls, the majority to patrons who were waiting for an item they had placed on hold. The return on investment was almost immediate. By eliminating the cost of maintenance for the old on-premises system, as well as the cost of analog phone lines, the cloud-based voice broadcasting app saved the consortium 40% per month in communications costs.

The new app is also more flexible and much faster. Every morning it automatically queues up the day’s messages and then places 500 to 600 calls in just three minutes. Using the old system, this same process took several hours. All voice messages are delivered using Twilio’s text-to-speech engine. The app also uses Twilio’s ability to detect answering machines to provide customized messages depending on whether the call is answered by a person or a machine.

With Twilio, the CLC was able to get the functionality it needed without having to pay for a costly upgrade. The results have prompted the CLC to consider extending the capabilities of its app to integrate automated renewals for patrons who get calls about overdue items.

Highlights

• The customer’s existing on- premises voice broadcasting solution was unsatisfactory and unreliable. The maintenance and upgrades required to fix it would have cost as much as $10,000.
• The Consortium replaced the system with one it built on Twilio’s Cloud Communications Platform.
• By replacing the system, the Consortium reduced its monthly telephony costs by 40 percent, because it no longer had to pay for license fees, maintenance or phone lines.
• A task that once took several hours each morning is now completed in just three minutes.

Please see our story on the Tampa Bay Library Consortium