Case Study - Chuck needed an organized system, not a secretary
Answer-All's client, Chuck Brown, was a heavy industrial contractor which did a lot of high rise structural steel projects.  He had used Answer-All's service for years to provide remote receptionist services. Chuck's business grew, to where he thought he needed to call and tell us he was at the point he had to hire a full time secretary to stay on top of business.

We set up a meeting to understand what Chuck was needing to accomplish. It soon became apparent that Chuck's problem was that he was buried in paperwork and didn't have the time to be a contractor. Many things on both sides were slipping thru the cracks.


The Solution
Our first step was to set up a fax system that went through our Unified messaging system. Now Chuck could get all of his faxes as a graphics file by email.  Second step
was to set up a filing system on his computer desktop. We simply made a folder for each of his projects, and then added a sub folders that had all his written communications. After he read each fax, he could simply drop it into the right folder and he would have
a record of every received fax.

We set up a voice mail that his phone system went into automatically. With a simple
pre-announcement, a caller could -

*Go to Chuck’s voice mail and leave a detailed message

*Push a key to be transferred directly to Chuck – wherever he was

*Press 0 to get a live operator to declare an urgency and have him track him down

*If his caller wanted to be transferred to Chuck, the system would ask the caller to state his name…then call Chuck at his prearranged numbers. When he picked up, the system would announce the caller, just like an assistant would which would allow Chuck to decide to take the call or send it to his voice mail.

*When he is talking to a caller, Chuck can simply press R for record to be able to have the conversation recorded. The conversation is then emailed to him … another file for his project folder on his computer desktop.

We then set up a system to completely manage all of his communications including many of the features our equipment allowed.

One nice feature of the system is that Chuck can push a key to dial the caller back
while he is listening to the message. This was a real time saver… Just as if Chuck would ask his assistant to get the caller on the phone for him, but Chuck could do this from his cell phone while he was on the job as well as from his office or home.

Finally, we set up a system that Chuck could call a contact through the Unified system. This was important to Chuck if he thought he might need to have a record of the call.
All he had to do was push the "7" on any telephone to record the call. The recording would be automatically sent to Chuck's computer via the Internet.


The Result
It took a couple of weeks to get Chuck to change his patterns to solve his record keeping problems, but now Chuck is really pleased he doesn't have to hire an assistant with all the expense, training, benefits and absenteeism that comes along with maintaining office employees.  He has the assurance that it is done right since he is in control and ended up saving more time for his family.

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