$77,000 for a 10-agent call center system?
Crusecom said forget it! The company, which focuses on business process outsourcing and the call center activities that support it, turned down Avaya’s bid and opted for Fonality’s PBXtra Call Center Edition with HUD Agent at a 75 percent savings. Just as valuable as the cost savings are the high availability and the ability to monitor call levels and adjust shifts and staffing levels accordingly.
Crusecom Selects PBXtra and Sails to Call Center Cost Savings and Staffing Efficiencies
Crusecom is a privately owned technology company focused on business process outsourcing (BPO) and call center activities that support it. The Michigan-based company has worked with more than 600 customers to determine which technologies are required to support their BPO plans. Today, Crusecom's target markets are state and local governments, and the telecommunications and mortgage industries. "Crusecom's business focus, moving call centers to rural America and providing customers with a lower cost alternative than shipping calls overseas, puts it on the leading edge. Working together, Crusecom and Fonality are making it possible to keep call center operations in the U.S," said Art Cruse, CEO at Crusecom.
High Call Volumes for 75 Percent Less than Avaya
Crusecom is using Fonality's PBXtra Call Center Edition to handle the more than 110,000 calls it receives monthly for the BPO call center projects it currently has in operation. Today, the company's 60 employees are providing 24x7 365 call center operations to state agencies and companies who want to keep call center operations in the U.S. but cannot afford the high costs of urban call centers. Within five years, Crusecom plans to be operating a 1,000-agent call center.
Fonality wasn't the only vendor Crusecom evaluated when shopping for its new PBX. It also looked at a system from Avaya which, for ten operators, cost $77,000. Fonality's price was $18,000, more than 75 percent less. Crusecom's PBXtra Call Center solution includes PBXtra Call Center edition, HUD Agent Edition, Polycom phones and full annual system maintenance. "After mapping our technology options to our BPO objectives, we determined that, from both product and strategic direction, Fonality was our best long term partner," said Cruse.
"We are not a typical call center because most of our calls are less than 90 seconds," said Cruse. "Fonality's engineers optimized our system to be very efficient, with long uptimes and high availability, which enables us to handle 5,000 calls in an eight hour period. I was very impressed with the way the Fonality team worked with us to provide a system that met and exceeded our expectations. Fonality's tech support and engineers are absolutely the most knowledgeable in the market today regarding Asterisk and Linux environments."
Enhanced Training and Customer Service
"HUD provides us with the ability to monitor calls for training and record calls for customers that need to keep recordings for 30 days," said Cruse. "Team leaders use the web-based reporting capabilities in PBXtra Call Center Edition to more closely watch company call levels and adjust shifts and staffing levels to accommodate call volume fluctuations; they can also look at trends to help them predict when call volumes are likely to be high in the future."
