When Jonathan Scott took over ownership of Cape Print, his multi-location organization was running three or four different phone systems using copper lines over PRIs. It was a nightmare to manage, and the bill cast a dark shadow over his profits. In 2009, he switched everything to a hosted PBX in hopes of streamlining management and slashing costs. For a while it worked, then his provider stopped working reliably and customers couldn’t get through for days at a time. Here’s what went wrong, and how he solved the problem for good.
Unsupportive relationships fail:
When one of your vendors gets purchased, it can cause anxiety over what’s going to happen to your level of service. In Jonathan’s case it went from great to grotesque when his hosted VoIP provider was purchased by Cbeyond. All of a sudden, service would drop, and the support was often “unsupportive”.
For months Jonathan tried to work it out with his phone service provider. But, he says, the camel’s back broke when, “All lines in went busy for over 2 days, and we ran up over $10,000 in accountable loses.”
Taking enterprise phone service into your own hands:
To rescue his business communications, Jonathan started looking for a new phone service platform. With two production facilities at either ends of the east coast, and locations hosting sales offices, he needed to be able to centrally manage his enterprise phones system. After some research, he had a hosted Asterisk system built to run his phones. The next step was picking a SIP trunk provider.
A Google search gave him a short list of service providers to choose from. “I didn’t gain a lot of confidence from the first few companies I looked at,” said Jonathan. “I received absolutely foul responses from customers Nextiva listed on their website.”
Every enterprise needs support to grow:
“What impressed me about Flowroute,” Jonathan explained, “was that when I dialed your 800 number, I immediately got someone on the phone who could answer all of my questions about our SIP trunking, even questions that had nothing to do with Flowroute.”
That expert-level, American-based support is important to Jonathan’s business. “When Cbeyond had an outage, I would get support in the Philippines who had no idea what was going on, or how to fix it.”
Jonathan’s initial experience with Flowroute encouraged him to port over his numbers, excited that he would no longer have to worry about having enough call channels. “One of the things that really attracted me to Flowroute was the unlimited channels, one phone number can handle unlimited calls.” In addition to the fact that calls now get through, Jonathan was happy that.
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You know when it works:
Now that Cape Print has a reliable phone service setup that can handle the needs of his entire enterprise, Jonathan sleeps better at night. “Flowroute is the perfect solution for our business,” he said. “Our company has the hosted PBX, we just need SIP trunking we can count on.”
Flowroute has been so reliable for Jonathan that he wants to share his discovery with other businesses. “I’m so pleased with how well Flowroute works, I’m making it the go to SIP trunking provider for the hosted PBX startup I’m funding.”
