ChowNow is a branded online ordering platform that enables restaurants with online ordering through web, social media outlets, and mobile applications. With an office of 30 people, including six salespeople, eight account managers, and three customer support reps they spend a lot of time on the phone. Because food delivery is a time sensitive industry, it is crucial that ChowNow customers and the people ordering through them be able to get in touch quickly and easily.
Understandably, when the company was founded in 2010, they were too busy getting the business up and running to really pay attention to which carrier their phone contractor connected them to. But by 2013, that carrier was causing problems. Service was intermittent. Chris Bennett, ChowNow’s Director of Engineering, explained customers often told him, “I tried calling you and I just got a deadline.” And as it turns out, the carrier was only running out of one data center. No redundancy.
ChowNow’s former carrier did finally add a second data center but the poorly communicated transition lead to an afternoon of dropped calls and more than a few irate customers. That was the last straw. They began looking for another solution and an employee recommended Flowroute.
They got in touch, and after some testing changed their whole phone system over to a hosted PBX running calls through Flowroute SIP trunks. Everyone in the office and some remote staff uses Flowroute for all inbound and outbound calling. And because they serve clients all across the US and Canada, that’s a lot of talk time.
Since the switch, Chris says the reliability of their phones has ceased to be an issue. He used to get complaints daily from employees and customers alike. But now, he says he never hears a peep about the system and business is running along smoothly, adding, “Transitioning from a fairly unreliable service to what I consider a very reliable service has had a huge impact.”
