Langham Logistics, headquartered in Indianapolis, is a global freight management organization. The company operates from a global logistics center in Indianapolis, maintaining partner relationships across the globe.
So obviously they can't afford downtime of technology systems. Executives recently launched a company-wide disaster recovery initiative designed to upgrade or replace these existing key systems, according to John Huybers, director of global information technology.
'Our communications system is our lifeblood,' Huybers said. 'It's critical that the phone system can function in an emergency. The phone is still used quite a bit in the transportation industry - whether our customers are calling us to schedule freight, or we're calling the transportation companies.'
Langham was using a Toshiba PBX. 'All of our phone system hardware was on site,' Huybers said. Besides the fact that it was hardware-based and offered no remote access, the ToshibaPBX had few capabilities beyond automatic call distribution and voice mail.
Langham decided on Enterprise Interaction Center from Interactive Intelligence over products from Ciscoand Mitel.
The Avaya, Cisco and Mitel solutions were largely hardware-based, Huybers said, adding that EIC was an all-software IP PBX that gave easy access to both on-site and remote employees. EIC also included interactive voice response, call queuing and routing, unified messaging, recording, and reporting features.
Huybers said the all-software platform and ease of deployment were major benefits of EIC. 'In addition to having all the features we needed, EIC gave us a cost-effective disaster recovery solution and the ability to make changes in-house.'
Employees are using EIC's unified messaging feature, which lets them receive fax and voice mail messages, along with e-mails, in the in-box on their computers. The unified messaging feature 'saves time, which equals increased productivity, since people no longer have to check voice mail messages from their phones, or chase down faxes from their fax machines,' he said.
To download a free customer case study and learn more about how Interactive Intelligenceimproved Langham Logistics' operations, click here.
David Sims is a contributing editor for ContactCenterSolutions. To read more of David's articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for ContactCenterSolutions here.
Edited by Patrick Barnard