- 113,000+ inbound calls handled by Flip in January alone
- Call-taker staffing reduced by half while maintaining 24/7 coverage
- Automation increased from <50% to 75–80% on booking calls
- ~90% booking completion rate once riders engage with the system
- 2,300+ automated callbacks re-engaging riders who abandoned bookings
Coventry Connections operates multiple taxi fleets across Ontario, handling a steady flow of inbound calls across several cities. With that footprint comes constant call volume and very little margin for missed calls.
Heading into the holiday season, Coventry’s phone operations were under increasing pressure.
“We were seeing a significant number of calls that just weren’t being handled,” said Marc Andre Way, the President and CEO of Coventry Connections. “And heading into the Christmas season, we knew that wasn’t sustainable.”
Coventry operated call centers in both Ontario and Jamaica, but performance had declined over the past year. External disruptions compounded the issue, and internal metrics were already raising concerns.
“Performance just wasn’t there. We were not seeing engagement,” Marc Andre said.
Legacy automation wasn’t filling the gap. “We had noticed over the past couple of years that our automation had stagnated just below 50%,” said Joe Boudreau, General Manager of Information Technology at Coventry Connections. In a market with a diverse caller base, their previous voice system struggled in real-world conditions, particularly with accents and speech variation. “We were actively on the lookout to find something to help out.”
With peak season approaching, Coventry needed a solution that could work at their scale, and they needed it fast. After meeting with Flip and testing the system, Marc Andre said the decision came down to urgency: “That’s at that point where we decided that we had nothing to lose except to try.”
“It was one of the best things we have done,” Joe explained.
Rapid Rollout under Pressure
Coventry began with a limited pilot, testing Flip on a single fleet before expanding further.
“We were testing it only with one,” Marc Andre said. What followed was a rapid expansion. Coventry moved quickly to bring additional fleets online. Boudreau confirmed, “We had all 6 companies within one week.”
That speed was especially impressive because the rollout wasn’t uniform. Coventry operates multiple fleets across different environments, and, as Marc Andre put it, “not each company is cookie-cutter.”
Matching that pace required the Flip team to move just as quickly. As Coventry expanded fleet by fleet, Flip worked in parallel to ensure each one could go live immediately, making “a little bit of an adjustment” depending on local operating conditions. The result was an onboarding process capable of supporting the full range of Coventry’s fleet, all within days.
Part of what made that complexity manageable was the ability to preconfigure common pickup destinations. Coventry could “preorganize locations like hospitals, malls, multi-door locations, or hotels,” Marc Andre said. Crucially, “it didn’t take a whole lot of customization from our side to get through all this.”
Coventry then moved quickly, relying on the Flip team to deliver. “We were putting a lot of pressure on them, and they came through with flying colors.”
Automation, Capacity, and Revenue Gains
The most immediate impact showed up in automation. After hovering below 50%, Coventry saw a sharp increase post-launch. “We have gone from just under 50% to anywhere from 75 to slightly over 80% in automation on incoming calls.”
Operationally, those gains translated into major cost savings.
“As soon as we realized the capacity of Flip, we started to reduce our call-taker count,” Marc Andre said.
Prior to Flip, in order to cover 24/7 operations, Coventry previously employed “about 180 individuals… We’re now down to 90.”
Joe pointed to speech recognition in real-world conditions as a major success driver. “The Flip AI recognizes stuttering. It recognizes accents. It recognizes people trying to say the same thing in a different order. It just sorts it out and corrects the issue,” he said.
“One of our biggest worries was the capacity issue,” Marc Andre said. During a snowstorm spike, Coventry saw concurrent demand that would have previously resulted in long queues or lost bookings. “At one point, we were running 50 calls at the same time through the AI system,” Marc Andre recalled. “There is no bottleneck that we have found so far.”
In addition to higher automation, Flip’s booking flow performed well once callers engaged. Coventry saw booking completion rates reach approximately 90%, crushing typical industry benchmarks.
Furthermore, Marc Andre highlighted a re-engagement flow for callers who hang up mid-booking:
“If someone who attempts to try to book something through Flip hangs up for whatever reason, there’s a callback feature. We lose less clients and less calls just by the fact that there’s a callback feature.”
“With just over 113,000 incoming calls that Flip handled in January, there were about 2,300 outgoing – reengaging the customer to continue their booking,” Joe explained.
This shift coincided with higher overall call volume. Marc Andre noted that in January, Coventry saw several days return to pre-COVID levels. “For certain days in the month of January, we’ve gone back to 2018, 2017 levels,” he said. Compared to the previous year, Coventry estimated being “15% over what we did last year in the number of calls.”
Operational Stability
Marc Andre described the working relationship with the Flip team as highly effective. “One of the biggest advantages is the speed at which the Flip team is able to reply to you, engage, find a solution, and most of the time, put that solution in place.”
As Flip became embedded in Coventry’s daily operations, the system was viewed as foundational rather than supplementary.
“If Flip suddenly wasn’t there,” said Marc Andre, “We would have a bunch of drivers in the yard yelling at us, we’re not having enough fares in a day.”
That dependency indicates a broader operational shift. With most routine calls handled automatically, live operators now focus on exceptions rather than volume. “Those 90 really only handle what Flip can’t handle.”
Thanks to the API connection with iCabbi, Flip’s voice automation was able to offer Smart Suggestions and faster booking options to callers. As a result, Coventry has found that their customers increasingly choose voice automation over waiting for a live agent, especially during peak periods.
“We see people calling in, asking for an operator, and then calling back minutes later and proceeding with Flip,” said Joe. “They realize going to an operator is going to involve a longer wait time.”
For Coventry, that customer choice reinforced confidence that the system handled real operating conditions, including weather events, rush periods, and seasonal demand.
Visibility and Control
Beyond call handling, Coventry emphasized the importance of visibility into performance as the system scaled.
“Having the ability to look at stats on a live basis is very, very reassuring and useful,” Marc Andre said. Early on, that visibility helped validate performance; over time, it’s become an operational tool.
Joe explained that Coventry tracks daily transfer reasons and adjusts accordingly. “We keep daily statistics on the calls that are being transferred to the call center, and we keep statistics on the reason why,” he said. “Based on those numbers, we are able to take action on what is being asked for.”
For Marc Andre, the combination of responsiveness and transparency mattered as much as raw performance. “We’re not talking about a ticket that lasts a week,” he said. “It’s a maximum of a few days. There’s zero downtime. We’re able to keep feeding the calls so that our drivers keep earning.”
The Road Ahead
The impact of Flip at Coventry ultimately came down to performance under real operating conditions. “Efficiency is the main point here,” Joe said. “During the three rushes of the day, the morning rush, the noon rush, and the afternoon rush, with Flip it’s seamless.”
That seamlessness removed friction rather than adding a new process. “There’s no shuffling of papers. There’s no trying to get someone on the radio. There’s no one on hold,” he said. “It just runs in the background and makes the operations so much smoother.”
For Coventry, the phone was no longer just managing call volume. It was built to handle demand as it came in.
“I don’t see anything stopping us from increasing or continuing down this path,” Marc Andre said. With Flip now embedded in day-to-day operations, Coventry has already begun exploring how voice automation could support additional fleets as the partnership grows.
