This article originally appeared in the March 2011 issue of INTERNET TELEPHONY.

Ameristar Jet Charters Inc. is flying high after bringing aboard a new contact center solution from NEC (News - Alert) Corporation of America.

One of the country’s largest operators of on-demand cargo jet aircraft, Ameristar Jet was ready to move to the next level with its contact center and communications solutions.

The InUCB blade-based server solution from NEC has enabled Ameristar Jet improve its customer service, according to the companies. More specifically, it has led to fewer abandoned calls, faster follow up with quotes for customers, and shorter average hold times.

“The call center is critical to our operations because we need to quickly access priority information, including the weather, a plane’s fuel status and the caller’s information file,” says Stacy Muth, vice president of operations at Ameristar Jet. “We’ve also embraced presence capabilities through InUCB, which allows our agents to see their colleagues’ availability, so callers are not transferred to busy agents.”

In addition to the unified communications features this solution offers Ameristar Jet’s call center operations, adopting InUCB – which is now available on NEC’s UNIVERGE SV8300 and SV8100 communications servers – also allowed the business to move to a single server for its contact center and voicemail. As a result, the new system is yielding a 60 percent reduction in server power requirements, not to mention the smaller physical footprint and management involved in this new set up. (Ameristar Jet was previously on NEC’s NEAX 2000 and used three separate servers for its contact center, voice and voicemail applications.)

“We’ve been a customer of NEC and AIT Technologies for nine years and have been happy with our solution, but our company is growing and we needed a solution that can grow with us,” says Muth.

Adds Larry Levenberg (News - Alert), vice president of sales and marketing for national channels at NEC (and the former writer of an INTERNET TELEPHONY column called The Channel Perspective): “NEC authorized dealer AIT Technologies suggested and implemented InUCB because presence was a key feature for Ameristar Jet. Ameristar Jet now has caller ID pop-up screens, the ability to quickly access subject matter experts and collaborate in real time to resolve issues on the fly. Also key to this implementation was the fact that InUCB loaded internally on the SV8300 is resulting in significant reductions in space requirements, power and cooling costs.”