Enhancing Customer Service with CallTower Unified Communications
The Company:
The largest privately held importer and master distributor of fasteners in the United States.
The Challenge
Every call Matters
The company now operates 16 distribution centers throughout the United States and Canada. Through the years the company has grown based on its reputation of providing first-class service. The company’s core operating principle is to build lasting relationships with its customers.
As the company grew its locations through the years the company ended up with nearly as many phone systems and communications service providers. None of the systems interacted with one another, and vendor and systems management was daunting to say the least. The business was challenged with how to keep all of the systems working, how to manage maintenance and upgrades to the different systems, and the company needed a backup system to ensure 100 percent uptime. The company began to research available managed voice and data services in 2006.
“We run a commodity business and if we cannot take the call and place the order at that moment we lose the sale,” said the CIO of the company. “We wanted to put all of our systems under the same service and manage a single vendor. We also wanted to do much more than our current phone systems were capable of and we wanted to realize some cost savings by consolidating – a tall order to fill.”
The Solution
The Partnership Begins
The company thoroughly researched the emerging area of managed communications services through a team comprised of IT, business owners and finance. The company sought to consolidate and enhance its phone systems and have one vendor manage everything from the phones to the communications network. After several months of research and evaluation the company decided to go with CallTower and its hosted unified communications solution because it offered all of the services the company was looking for through one vendor. “There really was no CallTower competitor,” the VP of IT said. “Nobody could offer one fully hosted solution and manage it.”
Implementation and Migration to Sprint MPLS network
The company chose to migrate to CallTower’s UC service slowly to ensure there was no interruption of service at any location during the move. Initially the Company started with phones with two features -voice mail and call forwarding – through CallTower’s hosted Cisco CallManager service and point-to-point circuits.
“It’s a slow painful process of moving phones and DID numbers but CallTower handled all of that and made it painless on our end. It was flawless for sites to come up and smooth for the company’s internal IT help desk. It’s been a partnership since day one – through the years both companies have grown and learned. Any time we have an issue arise CallTower always seems to find a solution to each problem,” said the VP of IT.
The company has since added audio conferencing, “Find me, Follow me,” and voice-to-text services and recently migrated to Sprint’s MPLS network which they chose for better reliability and to enable future bandwidth-intensive applications. Again, CallTower helped make this cutover seamless to the customer. In the near term the company will look at other services offered through CallTower including video conferencing, call center management and Microsoft Office Communications Server.
The Results
Impact on the Bottom line
End user acceptance of the CallTower service has been “rapid and wonderful” according to the VP of IT. The company’s branch managers appreciate one place to go (the internal help desk which then turns to CallTower) for any issues that arise and that issues are resolved quickly.
According to the VP of IT, the company has realized immediate savings and long-term gains by using CallTower’s solutions. First, the company saw an immediate cost savings of 25 percent in local and long distance calls by consolidating vendors and service. Second, the company’s overhead costs for IT management, maintenance service contracts and upgrades decreased.
“We were made for the CallTower business model,” said the VP of IT. “With our 16 locations with 16 disparate systems we needed a single vendor and solution that met our communications needs, grew with us, exceeded our customer service requirements and provided savings. We couldn’t have been able to move through the recession without CallTower’s service because every call that comes in needs immediate attention.”
Contact us for more customer success stories and testimonials here.
