Company improves customer service, establishes satellite office with Versature Hosted PBX

Versature has helped us deliver outstanding service to our clientele. Because it’s so easy to transfer calls to satellite or home offices, it’s no longer a requirement for our staff to work out of our corporate office in Ottawa. As a result, we’ve been able to reach out to a broader talent pool to fill new positions. We can now hire the absolute best person for the job – whether or not they are local
-Sean Costello, Founder, IronGate Server Management & Consulting

Company: IronGate Server Management & Consulting of Ottawa, Ontario provides niche server management and consulting services to corporate Mac environments across North America.

Goal: Find a scalable phone system that would support mobile workers and transparently transfer calls to satellite and remote offices.

Situation: Before choosing the Versature Hosted PBX phone service, IronGate used an internally-managed PBX with two phone lines. While the company was able to receive client calls, there was no way to transfer client calls to employees at satellite or home offices.

“In our business, a customer may need to talk to more than one of our employees – a project manager might need to transfer a client to a tech support representative, for example. Our staff is very mobile and our old phone system didn’t let us transfer a call to a cell phone or a remote office ─ we often needed to ask the client to hang up and dial a new number. With Versature, we can instantly put a client in touch with the right employee whether that employee is working from our headquarters, from home, or from another city altogether,” says Costello.

IronGate had no desire to develop and manage a new on-site PBX server. “We’re big believers in specialization and although we’re a technical shop, we didn’t want to build a phone system subject to our own knowledge and experience,” Costello explains. “We preferred to leave that to the experts.”

Solution & Results: Costello contacted Versature based on a recommendation from a colleague. “I was very happy that they could provide us with demo equipment to test out the phone system because we needed to make sure that it would fit with our work style,” notes Costello. “We’re a people-driven organization and we understand that our employees have busy lives outside of work,” he adds. “That being said, our customers expect to reach our staff during work hours. We quickly realized that the ability to take Versature phones home and plug them into a standard Internet connection would really help our employees balance their work/life needs.”

IronGate selected Versature’s EXTREME bundle and leveraged its new phone system’s capabilities to open a satellite office in Oshawa. “We were able to hire a talented employee who wasn’t able to move to Ottawa. That’s something we would never have been able to do with our old phone system,” Costello notes. “We’ve also been able to improve employee satisfaction by allowing staff to work different hours and from home when necessary.”

Costello also says that the Versature phone system has improved customer service. “Clients are seeing faster response times now that we have voicemails sent to employees via email. Mobile staff can access voicemails from their computer and can respond to voicemail more quickly as a result. We’re also able to seamlessly transfer customer calls within the organization, which is very important to us and to our clients.”