Crusecom Saves $250,000 Per Year with Fonality's VoIP and CRM-Ready IP-PBX Call Center Solution

In an example of how businesses can leverage technology to save money and boost productivity, an Oscoda, Michigan-based IT company said today that it’s saving more than $250,000 by using an IP-PBX (News - Alert) call center solution.

 

Officials at Crusecom – a company whose solutions cover call centers, network management and systems integration – say using the so-called “PBXtra Call Center” edition from Los Angeles-based Fonality has fueled growth as well as savings.

 

According to the company’s chief executive officer, Art Cruse, Fonality’s (News - Alert) product allowed Crusecom to establish cost-effective, outsourced call centers onshore.

 

“When we bought our Fonality system, it was 75 percent less than a comparable Avaya (News - Alert) system,” Cruse said. “With Avaya, we would easily be paying an extra $250,000 per year in support, maintenance and hardware costs, which would directly impact our bottom line and limit our growth capabilities.”

 

For Fonality, a company that offers open source phone systems and contact center solutions for small and medium-sized businesses, PBXtra Call Center is part of a family of phone systems built on a unique architecture known as “hybrid-hosted,” diagrammed below.

 

A combination of premise-based and hosted systems, the PBXtra family provides features such as free VoIP calling and system monitoring, as well as solid PSTN connectivity and data privacy. Fonality offers several PBXtra packages which, depending on a business’s needs, can be adjusted to include features such as on-the-fly recording, click-to-call and call monitoring. The packages range in base price from $995 to $6,995.

 

The PBXtra solution that Crusecom opted for – the Call Center edition, which starts at $2,995 – offered cost-savings that allowed the company to keep its call center operations in the United States – something that public and private agencies seek to do, but often cannot because of the high costs that come with urban facilities. Since deploying PBXtra Call Center last year, Crusecom says it’s expanded its customer base and added 50 new call center agents.

 

Cruse said that the more calls his company’s call centers get, the more money it saves.

 

 “We’ve been able to reinvest these cost savings in our company and grow our business very rapidly,” he said.

 

Fonality’s PBXtra Call Center is designed to bring to SMBs what once was the exclusive domain of telemarketing organizations and larger companies: an affordable solution for businesses with a high volume of inbound and outbound calls. Fonality offers call queues, automatic call distribution, real-time reports and customer relationship management integration.

 

Crusecom’s story is hardly unique.

 

As TMCnet reported, a Pasadena-California based Web retailer that helps women find fitting, flattering clothes says that Fonality’s PBXtra Call Center solution is helping it meet sharply rising growth and consumer demand.

 

The founders of myShape say they’d done such brisk business since setting up shop in 2004 that they’ve been forced to move into a more accommodating office. Yet the company couldn’t simply take their old phone system with them.

 

According to myShape co-founder John Dmohowski, the 60-person company developed an aggressive growth strategy and its IT staff shopped around for a dynamic phone system with scalability.

 

“PBXtra Call Center is nice because it does not get in the way,” he said. “The phones work like the devices people have been using their whole lives, which is not entirely true of all new products that are supposed to make our lives easier.”

 

Officials at Crusecom echo those sentiments.

 

With PBXtra Call Center, the company says it’s become the only electronic benefits transfer call center in the nation that offers real-time, Web-based service level agreement reporting. According to Cruse, the solution’s enhanced reporting features likely save Crusecom an additional $100,000 per year in man hours.

 

For Chris Lyman (News - Alert), Fonality’s chief executive officer, Crusecom is an example of how the call center market is shifting away from “cumbersome, big-iron” oligopolies, toward SMBs that can use agile technologies.

 

“Small and mid-size call centers need affordable, flexible phone systems with solid service agreements that allow them to grow rapidly,” Lyman said. “Fonality is delivering on these requirements and is constantly innovating with newer advanced technologies.”