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From Regional Operator to National Operation with Mitel Phone System |
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Since his father acquired Courier Express in 1990, Jim Messerly, President, has watched the company’s steady growth into freight and warehousing services. Today, Jim, his father and brother oversee a six-office, multi-warehouse business that operates 24x7x365. By 2004, the Messerlys realized that the company needed to operate as a unified entity rather than as multiple regional offices. The old analog phone system was one of the key sticking points in achieving that goal. “Each location had a separate phone system and was on its own exchange,” Jim Messerly remembers. “That system didn’t let us function well as a multi-site operation.” Since implementing a Mitel® IP-based phone system, however, Messerly says everything has changed. A Seamless Business with National Reach Thanks to IP technology and the Mitel 3300 Integrated Communications Platform (ICP), IP phones and Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) capabilities, Courier Express now communicates as a unified operation. Core to that is the way in which calls are handled. “Each office handles its own calls during the day,” Messerly reports, “and at around 6:00 p.m., the regional offices transfer their calls to headquarters in Marietta. When all the ACD agents at one location log off, the calls are automatically transferred here.” Not only is the 24-hour phone service seamless, Messerly says it’s also personalized. The system is configured so that when calls are rerouted from the regional offices, the person answering can see where the call is from. “If a call comes in from Nashville, we answer as ‘Courier Express Nashville’. This increases our customer service capabilities.” |
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Intra-office communication has also improved dramatically with four-digit dialing
between locations. “Now, there’s no difference between me being next door to
my brother in his office versus being four hours away in the Charlotte office,”
Messerly raves. The company is also saving on long distance charges between
locations, which, at 70 per cent of the company’s long distance calls, added up
to more than $1,000 each month using the old phone system. A Better Functioning Company Despite the hard dollar savings, Messerly emphasizes that the most important benefit of the phone system is the unified corporate culture it enables. “Our ability to communicate with the offices and work with them like they’re just next door has made us function better.” With the use of unified messaging each employee now has voice mail, which was previously cost prohibitive, and voice mails can be automatically forwarded as sound files to the employee’s email account. Messerly also holds weekly conference calls with the company’s General Managers using the Mitel 5310 IP Conference Unit. “I just dial their extensions and it doesn’t cost me a penny,” he reports. “It’s the next best thing to them being in the room with me. Our increased level of communication with regional offices has allowed them to grow much more.” With the Mitel Teleworker Solution, Messerly and other staff can work from home as if they were in the office – even using the paging feature on the teleworker phone to page employees at the office. “If a sales person we want to hire can’t relocate, it’s no longer a deal breaker because we can just set them up from a home office with all the same capabilities.” And ACD allows the company “to do pretty much anything we want with calls. I can have as many call groups as I want and rotate calls between groups – if Group A is busy calls go to Group B and so on. There’s no more chaos now.” “The Mitel phone system has made our operations ONE,” Messerly concludes. “The physical distribution of our offices is not as important now because we have a presence as a company thanks to IP technology, and Mitel is an instrumental part of that. Life without Mitel or IP is unimaginable now, because of the closeness that it brings us even as we grow outward as a company.” |
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