SunPorch has reduced its annual advertising spend by $100,000 because of its deployment of PBXtra Call Center from Fonality. Fonality’s call center system, which was chosen over more costly and less flexible solutions from Avaya, Cisco and 3Com, enabled SunPorch to revitalize its marketing programs. With PBXtra Call Center, SunPorch is able to track the success of individual advertisements to eliminate unnecessary ad spending and gather enhanced business intelligence to better define and measure new revenue-generating marketing campaigns.

“PBXtra Call Center from Fonality is an essential tool for our company. I don’t know how we lived without it,” said Leo Mueller, director of marketing at SunPorch. “Initially we thought the only call center solution we could afford was to outsource to a third party. With PBXtra Call Center we’ve been able to keep our call center operations in-house, which means we have higher levels of customer service and better control over our sales and marketing efforts, including our advertising program.”

SunPorch assigns a different phone number to each advertisement it runs and uses PBXtra Call Center to automatically identify the advertising source for each customer who calls. When customers respond to direct marketing promotions, PBXtra Call Center places them into a call queue designed specifically for that program. “PBXtra Call Center has provided us with the business intelligence we need to accurately evaluate how our advertising programs are working and to identify new marketing opportunities,” continued Mueller. “Thanks to PBXtra Call Center we’ve been able to more accurately target our advertising dollars and have reduced our annual overall expenses by $100,000.”

Additionally, Fonality’s unique hybrid-hosted Anywhere Management feature was a key component of the company’s successful customer response system in the wake of Hurricane Ike. When SunPorch’s Louisville, KY factory lost power due to the storm, Mueller was able to remotely access the call center system and record an emergency greeting in less than 10 minutes without hiring an expensive consultant. PBXtra Call Center allowed SunPorch to quickly implement a professional recording in response to the emergency, which helped maintain customer service levels and ensured calls could be redirected to the company headquarters for handling. Fonality’s patented hybrid-hosted model supports remote workers and enables remote management to provide added flexibility even when natural disasters strike.

“Call center solutions from old guard vendors aren’t agile, efficient or cost effective enough to generate the kind of business results SunPorch has achieved,” said Corey Brundage, VP of marketing and product management at Fonality. “Thanks to PBXtra Call Center, SunPorch didn’t have to outsource their operations. There are a lot of small businesses in the same boat and we are eager to help all of them deploy great in-house call center systems without breaking the bank.”