NacTel installs and integrates new customer communications system for Drive Medical

Aug 25 2010

NacTel (North Atlantic Communications), a leading provider of enterprise telecommunications and data systems has successfully installed and integrated a new state-of-the-art customer communications system for Drive Medical Design & Manufacturing, one of the fastest growing durable medical equipment companies in the world.  Drive Medical needed a sophisticated feature set to serve its customers, and chose the ShoreTel UC system, a brilliantly simple unified communication (UC) solution based on its award-winning IP business phone system, installed by NacTel.

ShoreTel's unique distributed architecture offers an appliance-based network with built in N+1 redundancy, rather than a more complex server-based network. In a typical Nx2 or 2N network, equipment is typically doubled, which is expensive and highly inefficient. ShoreTel's easy-to-use management interface offers a single image across all appliances with distributed processing, so there is no single point of failure. By adding just one additional appliance — the "1" of the N+1 technology — any failure is handled, creating redundancy throughout the entire system.  

As part of its all-in-one solution, Drive Medical chose the ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center to link its corporate office in Port Washington, NY with four discrete locations in Hauppauge, NY, Pico Rivera, CA, Toronto, CANADA and Atlanta, GA, all with more than 200 users.  The ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center offers many features critical to boosting Drive Medical's sales, marketing and support effort including:

• Seamless movement across all locations so that when New York closes at 5 EST, calls would be rerouted to California for the next three hours.
• Routing to telecommuter agents across the US and United Kingdom.
• Dynamic Priority Routing that includes all rule-based routing, but with additional highly flexible routing features, including the ability to send customers to the front of the queue if they need to move to another department, priority routing based on the skill sets of agents on hand, and electronic routing slips that provide notes associated with the customer.
• Intelligent Call Routing that assigns a specialist based on the criteria of the customer.  For example, if the call comes from a major distributor or a priority business partner it will be routed to an agent handling that account or that level of customer automatically.

Drive Medical Chief Technology Officer Charles P. Chiodo explained what made the project successful. "The term partnership is so overused that I feel a little self conscious about using it but with NacTel, that's exactly what it was.  NacTel became part of our team in every way. They introduced us to technology that we did not know existed, dramatically impacting the output of our very busy call center with 15,000 calls per month… improving the overall customer experience.  And when our existing systems caused the inevitable glitch before we went live, NacTel was right there to help. Never did I feel that they were a vendor—they were always part of the team."

NacTel President Jamie Buswell commented, "We could see from the beginning that Drive Medical's business model demanded a more intelligent call center management system.  As soon as we began outlining the capabilities of the ShoreTel Contact Center, to the Drive Medical team, their eyes lit up even more than when we explained how the appliance-based communications platform worked.  It was extremely gratifying to see how we could impact a company's marketing effort that much."