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OBJECTIVE:
Adventure Center organizes and implements culturally-based group adventure tours in remote, exotic destinations around the world. The company’s 20 employees rely rather heavily on the company’s phone system to facilitate inbound calls regarding their services, to plan trips and communicate with clientele. As the staff is highly valuable to the success of Adventure Center, it needed to ensure it could retain its employees by offering them flexible schedules and help maintain a healthy quality of life. Richard McConnell, director of IT and operation at the company, needed to find a phone system that could accommodate the staff as well as help improve and grow the organization’s business.

CHALLENGE:
Adventure Center’s employees are a highly-trained group of people who each bring a great deal of value to the company. However, several workers were experiencing strain due to harsh commute hours, and a few needed to relocate for personal reasons but didn’t want to sacrifice their relationship with the company.

In order to retain its staff and help improve their quality of life, Adventure Center sought a new phone system that could facilitate remote extensions. After evaluating 20-30 vendors over nine months, the company selected Switchvox SMB to best meet its needs. As Switchvox is a completely on-site solution, Richard felt comfortable in knowing that he can make alterations to the system on the spot, compared to other ‘hybrid’ solutions that require changes to be made remotely. Additionally, Switchvox offered Adventure Center the most extensive set of features at an affordable price.

SOLUTION:
With Switchvox, Adventure Center can offer its staff flexible hours that fit their schedules. By facilitating remote extensions, employees can work from home during heavy commute hours, escaping the stress and pressure of morning and evening traffic. In addition, staff that moved to both San Diego and Bangkok can continue working and servicing clients through the Switchvox system without incurring long distance charges or requiring a separate phone number.

Switchvox also gave Adventure Center a few additional benefits it did not anticipate when it purchased the IP PBX. The flexibility of the system allows Adventure Center to use multiple 800 numbers, enabling them to publish unique phone numbers for each advertisement they place. This helps them have a better feel for their ROI and track the effectiveness of their advertisements. Additionally, Switchvox’s detailed reports give Adventure Center better visibility into their peak calling hours to better staff the office during high-traffic times of the day.

Lastly, as Switchvox is an affordable, on-premise solution, Adventure Center purchased an extra server to have ready for back-up in case something were to happen to the primary one in use. This provides the company with peace of mind knowing its business will never be impacted for an extended period of time as it has another phone system pre-configured and ready to take over at a moment’s notice.

RESULT:
Since deploying Switchvox, Adventure Center has increased the overall efficiency of its operations. By having the ability to offer its employees flexible hours and remote working scenarios, it has retained staff, eliminating costs associated with recruitment and training. Furthermore, because the company can track its call volume through Switchvox’s detailed reporting, it can staff its office more intelligently. This has enabled Adventure Center to field a higher volume of incoming calls, also helping to increase sales by reducing the number of missed or abandoned calls.

In addition, Switchvox has allowed Adventure Center to better evaluate its advertising decisions. By running each ad with a unique phone number and tagging it in the Switchvox system, the organization can keep track of how many people respond to each of its placements. This, in turn, helps Adventure Center employees field the calls more effectively, as they know in advance which ad the caller is responding to and what they are interested in.


About Digium
Digium®, Inc., the Asterisk® Company, created, owns and is the innovative force behind Asterisk, the most widely used open source telephony software. Since its founding in 1999, Digium has grown to become the open source alternative to the traditional communication providers, with offerings that cost as much as 80 percent less than proprietary voice communication platforms. Digium makes Asterisk available to the open source community under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and uses business-class Asterisk to power a broad family of products for small, medium and large businesses. Digium acquired Switchvox, the leading supplier of small business phone systems based on Asterisk, in September 2007. The company’s product line also includes a wide range of hardware to enable resellers and customers to design their own voice over IP (VoIP) systems. This year alone, more than six billion minutes of calls will be made using Asterisk. More information is available at www.digium.com.

The Digium logo, Digium, Asterisk, Asterisk Business Edition, AsteriskNOW, Asterisk Appliance, Switchvox and the Asterisk logo are trademarks of Digium, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

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