PREM

What do you do if you are a technology minded real estate management firm with over $1 billion in real estate assets and you're planning for a call center? If you are Oregon-based PREM Group, you choose Fonality's PBXtra Call Center Edition and HUD Pro, of course. Beating out ShoreTel on both price and standards-based technology, PBXtra provided a powerful call center solution that integrates with CRM software, helps build customer retention and improves employee efficiency.

Prepping for a Call Center — PBXtra and PREM Group Set the Stage

What do you do if you are a technology minded real estate management firm with over $1 billion in real estate assets and you're planning for a call center? If you are Oregon-based PREM Group, you choose Fonality's PBXtra Call Center Edition and HUD Pro, of course. Beating out ShoreTel on both price and standards-based technology, PBXtra provided a powerful call center solution that integrates with CRM software, helps build customer retention and improves employee efficiency.

PREM Group is a Portland, Oregon-based real estate management company with approximately 2.5 million square feet of real estate assets valued at $1 billion. The company's vision is to be the most progressive and innovative real estate service company, and it views technology as a strategic asset for reaching this goal. Given its top-down approach to technology and future plans for a call center, it's no wonder that when PREM Group decided to purchase a new phone system, it selected Fonality's PBXtra Call Center Edition and HUD Pro, which supports the latest and greatest in convergent technologies.

Standards-Based Wins the Race

"We looked at several vendors, namely Fonality and ShoreTel," said Brian Thompson, chief information officer at PREM Group. "We were attracted to Fonality for several reasons. In addition to cost, the fact that the technology is standards-based and SIP [session initiation protocol]-supported architecture was also instrumental in our decision. The PBXtra system was extremely well priced; it cost us roughly half of what a ShoreTel system would have cost."

Being a technology-minded company, PREM Group has its eye on the future and is interested in adopting new, convergent technologies that integrate well with other systems. According to Thompson, "it was important that our new phone system support open standards, especially SIP. SIP support is one of the reasons we chose Fonality over ShoreTel: PBXtra supports SIP and ShoreTel does not. Fonality allows us to integrate PBXtra with SugarCRM, our customer relationship software. This enables us to build customer retention by delivering highly personalized services according to individual customer attributes and history. It goes beyond conventional "help desk" solutions by automating not only the agent-customer interaction, but by creating an enterprise workflow focused on serving customers through fulfillment of their requests."

Sophisticated Options with PBXtra and HUD

Although PREM Group does not have a true call center in place today, it selected Fonality's most powerful phone system -- PBXtra Call Center Edition. The choice of PBXtra Call Center Edition allows PREM Group to link transactions in the call center with back office fulfillment operations, and leverage some powerful call center features, such as load balancing and call queues. This ensures that the company has the appropriate system in place to create a complete, in-house call center within the next year.

Of particular interest to PREM Group was Fonality's HUD Pro product, which gives operators a sophisticated way to handle incoming calls. "With HUD Pro, our operators can park a call and check a property manager's availability before transferring the call or putting it through to voicemail," Thompson continued. "HUD Pro is an efficiency tool that fits well with our corporate mission, and helps us serve our customers better." All PREM Group employees also use HUD from their desktops for interoffice dialing and to determine who is in the office or on the phone at any given time. "The ability with HUD to just click and automatically call an employee's cell phone is a very popular feature with our employees."