| Customer: | Iowa Focus |
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| Savings: | Approx. $2,850 per year |
Iowa Focus is one of the largest providers of community based services in Southern Iowa and has been a Heartland Voip client since 2010. Over that time we have solved many of their IT related challenges including; custom website & applicaiton development, networking & firewall, site-to-site VPN, email migration, sycronized remote backups and hosted PBX services.
This case study will focus on hosted PBX services.
Iowa focus has 5 locations throught Iowa. Proior to switching to a hosted Voip PBX, a receptionist would answer and transfer calls using a traditional PBX at the two largest locations. The remaining three locations had a single phone line that would be answered. The PBX's were location locked, and had only very basic features. And because the incoming lines were traditional phone lines, if all of the lines were in use, employees would have to wait for a call to free up to dial an outbound call.
To solve this challege Heartland Voip created a network plan that connects all of the offices to a single hosted PBX.
Unlike a traditional PBX all phones are now be manged from a single PBX.
Installing a firewall and POE switch at each location ensured voice traffic could receive priority routing and the POE switch was used to power the SIP desk phones.
By consolidating their phone service over 5 locations to a single hosted PBX Iowa Focus reduced their telephony rates by about $2,850 per year while also reducing administrative overhead.
A company wide hosted Voip PBX allowed for eaiser communication between employees. They can now simply dial an extension to reach other employees at other locations.
Features like voicemail, voicemail to email, and the ability to place calls to customers at any time improved communications with their customers.
| Customer: | Mama's Pizza |
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| Savings: | $2,520 per year in telephony |
Mama's Pizza has been a staple in Omaha since 1975. As of 2013 they have three busy locations throughout the metro area. When they reached out to Heartland Voip, their core challenge was handling incoming calls for takeout orders especially during the busy evening dinner rush.
Each Mama's location had 2 traditional phone lines to handle incoming calls. If the main phone line was busy the call would roll over to the second phone line and ring a second phone. This meant that if two customers were placing a order, any new calls to the business would hear a busy signal, forcing them to call back, or worse call a competitor.
To solve Mama's incoming call capacity problem Heartland Voip provisioned a Virtual PBX and ported their main phone numbers to a wholesale SIP provider. We also integrated the Voip system with their POS system so that when a call came in the POS could look up the caller's pizza order history.
The IVR kept calls meant for managers or customers with general questions away from the pizza ordering process.
If the employees taking customers orders are on the phone, new callers enter a call queue where they are told their position in line and hear about special offerings from Mama's Pizza while they wait.
Integrating caller ID with their existing POS allows the employee to see the customer's order history, and serve them more efficiently, freeing them up for the next call in line.
By consolidating their phone service over three locations to a single virtual PBX and utilizing a wholesale SIP trunking provider Mama's was able to reduce their telephony bill by $2,520 per year.
Before switching to a virtual PBX each Mama's location could handle a maximum of 2 simultaneous calls; any additional caller would receive a busy signal.
Call queues allows callers to wait in a virtual line where they hear about new offerings and advertising from Mama's.
During busy weekend ordering hours call queues can average 8 customers deep or more.
Each order takes less than a minute for the employees to enter. This means that during peak times Mama's is able to serve up to 4x the customers than with their old phone system.
| Customer: | Gazella WiFi |
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| Savings: | Over $1,800 per year |
GazellaWiFi.com is a wifi marketing platform startups. Like many startups they use Zendesk to help manage their customer support issues. This was great, but in order to identify and route calls properly with robust features like an IVR, call forwarding, and time of day routing they would have had to upgrade their service and pay an additional $30 per employee to unlock these basic features in Zendesk.
To solve their problem Heartland Voip provisioned and configured Gazella a virtual PBX system. We configured Twilio to be the trunk provider and set up basic features like voicemail, an IVR and time of day routing.
To help increase productivity, we also did some custom asterisk programming in their PBX to automagically create a ticket in Zendesk when a caller selects support as their IVR destination. So when a support call comes in the caller details are already available in Zendesk for the agent to work the support ticket. A more in depth explanation of the customization can be found here.
Because Gazella had their own full featured PBX they were able to forgo the added expense of upgrading 7 employee accounts in Zendesk and still take advantage of automated ticket creation.
Because Gazella was free to choose their own telephony carrier, they also saved approximately 50% over the per minute charges associated with Zendesk.