STS Holding

Feature-rich products at an unexpectedly low price. Flat monthly maintenance fees and unlimited support cases. An ear to the ground on what customers want and an ability to customize to their needs. Sound too good to be true? Not if you are STS Holdings, a leading provider of staffing services to the aerospace industry, and you've just replaced your I3 call center system with PBXtra Call Center Edition and HUD Agent from Fonality.

STS Holdings Chooses PBXtra and Says Bye-Bye to Inflated Call Center Costs

Since 1981, STS has placed aviation professionals across the globe and has earned an outstanding reputation for delivering quality and experience. To meet its staffing needs, STS operates its own call center that manages approximately 2,500 inbound and outbound calls each day with a small internal staff. STS wanted to move to a VoIP-capable call center system to achieve long term cost savings in long distance and be able to leverage off-site call center agents. After evaluating products from Interactive Intelligence, Zultys, Digium, NEC, and Avaya, STS selected Fonality's PBXtra Call Center Edition and HUD Agent edition.

Moving to VoIP for Cost Savings and Remote Agents

Prior to choosing Fonality, STS had been using a full featured Interactive Intelligence (I3) call center system since 1998. "We were happy with the aging I3 system's core features, but decided to shop around for alternatives rather than pay the high purchase price and support costs to upgrade, install and configure a new VoIP-capable version of I3," said Rob Wire, director of information technology at STS. The new call center system needed to provide STS with all of the standard call center features it had grown accustomed to with I3. These features included automatic call distribution (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR) capabilities for managing call flow with menus, agent-abandoned reports, and client software that supported call transfers to agents or queues.

After evaluating the other call center options, Wire was thrilled to find trixbox (then called Asterisk@Home), which is free, open source software and much less expensive to deploy than the other vendors. "I was very impressed with how quickly I could download trixbox and get a test call center up and running on nothing more than a laptop, but it lacked some of the client software, faxing and business support features we required. I started looking around and was extremely happy to find PBXtra Call Center Edition, which is a fully supported commercial Asterisk-based call center product that provided even more functionality than our previous solution and was much less expensive to purchase and maintain."

Fonality Doesn't Break the Bank

"Although we have the same enterprise needs as a larger company," Wire continued. "We did not want to spend $100,000 on a new call center. Thanks to PBXtra Call Center Edition, we didn't have to."

Another stand out for Wire has been Fonality's support and maintenance. "I3's reseller charged us an aggressive hourly billing rate for support and any customizations or changes we needed to make, which didn't allow us to budget properly. Fonality offered a flat annual maintenance fee and unlimited support cases, which made it easy for us to plan. Their professional service fees for customizations were very reasonable. Fonality has a brilliant email support ticketing system that prioritizes support requests and its suggestion queue is also phenomenal. They actually make development decisions and provide regular updates based on customer feedback!"

Predictive Dialing and Fax Integration

PBXtra Call Center Edition and HUD Agent are keeping good pace at STS, easily handling its 2,500 daily inbound and outbound calls, including 800 or so that are placed by an outbound predictive dialing program. "Fonality has been very accommodating to our requests," Wire continued. "We asked them to provide us with a way to integrate PBXtra with our third party predictive dialing product and were so impressed with how they responded. They even designed a way for our predictive call recipients to press a key to speak with a live agent via a queue."

Wire also required that the new call center system provide STS with integrated fax capabilities. "We are a fax-intensive business and needed our new phone system to accept faxes on the same dual use 800 numbers we've always used. We asked Fonality to integrate faxing options and they partnered to provide us with a solution that performs exactly the way we needed it to."