Combest Delivers World Class Managed Services with ReliaTel...
ReliaTel Helps Combest Increase Customer Satisfaction and Service Growth
Established in 1994, Combest has become recognized nationally as a leading provider in design, deployment and management of telephony, data networking and converged solutions. From their headquarters in Georgia, Combest partners with leading telecommunications equipment providers such as Avaya, Cisco and Mitel to provide “best-in-class” solutions to their customers.
Business Problem
While Combest's mission has always been to generate outstanding results in customer satisfaction, in 2003 Combest launched an effort to make their Service and Support Center the industry's best. The cornerstone to accomplishing this was to provide a highly responsive service by which Combest could react quickly to problems within their customers’ voice environments. In order to achieve the type of customer satisfaction needed to meet their newly defined business goals, Combest recognized that they needed to implement a “best-in-class” network management solution that provided enterprise-class remote monitoring and alarm notification capabilities. |
|
“With shrinking profit margins on hardware, our goal was to place a bigger emphasis on service revenue as a way to continue to grow our business. To do that we wanted to establish a world class Service and Support Center that could effectively compete for the maintenance business of middle and large organizations.
We felt that a state-of-the-art remote monitoring solution would give us the competitive advantage we needed to accomplish our goal.”
- Richard Pusbach, President |
Network Management Challenge
When reviewing network management solutions, Combest wanted to find a partner that would meet all of the company’s current and future needs. Combest set forth with a very thorough set of requirements for a monitoring solution. The solution they chose would have to provide the following:
- The robustness to manage and monitor the voice environments of Combest's worldwide customer base.
- The flexibility to monitor the traditional PBXs and voice mail servers such as Definity, Meridian, SX2000, Intuity, and Octel, as well as monitoring the cutting edge VoIP devices and environments such as Cisco’s Unified Communications Manager, Avaya’s Call Manager, data switches and routers, and voice applications such as IVRs, CMS, etc.
- Comprehensive capabilities that enabled Combest's Service and Support Center to quickly respond to alarms and problem conditions with voice environments under maintenance. It was Combest's goal to reduce the Mean Time to Repair by 20%, thereby enabling Combest to better the Service Level Commitments that are a part of their maintenance offerings.
- Finally, the remote monitoring solution had to enable Combest to demonstrate to their customers the added value that Combest provides as the industry leader. As such, they needed a way to separate Combest from the competition.
Technology Solution
Combest evaluated a variety of solutions. Many were vendor-specific applications that didn't allow Combest to effectively monitor their customers’ multi-vendor environments. A solution, for instance, that just monitored Avaya's products wasn't sufficient for a customer whose network consisted of Avaya and Cisco equipment. Other solutions required expensive buffer boxes, which didn't make sense when many PBXs could dial out alarm information without adding additional hardware. Solutions such as this just represented added costs and another point of failure. |
|
“The competition couldn’t provide the flexibility we needed to be able to respond to our customer problems quickly and efficiently.
ReliaTel allows us to diagnose problems quickly and get the right technician working on the problem within minutes. As a result, we have been able to reduce our Mean Time to Repair by 27%”
- Billy Strickland, Vice President |
Combest chose the ReliaTel network monitoring and management solution from Tone Software to meet their critical network management needs. ReliaTel was the only solution that could satisfy Combest’s requirements of being able to monitor multi-vendor networks as well as provide the flexibility to scale easily to meet the changing needs of Combest’s rapidly growing customer base.
Combest's Service and Support Center can now quickly and efficiently respond to alarms and service outages utilizing ReliaTel. Using a variety of different notification mechanisms including email, pager, phone, audio and visual alerts, Service and Support Center personnel are now quickly made aware of problems and given the information they need to quickly resolve the problem or escalate the problem to the appropriate field technician.
Business Result
In recognition of their business decision to focus on customer satisfaction, aided by Tone Software’s ReliaTel solution, Combest has continuously gained recognition for their excellence in the area of customer satisfaction.
In 2003 Combest was recognized as Avaya's Business Partner of the Year, which was immediately followed in 2004 with Combest's selection as an Avaya Platinum Provider, the highest partnership designation awarded by Avaya - given only to partners that deliver
best-in-class customer service and support. |
|
“The savings we have identified for our customers has built the kind of loyalty that keeps our customers on maintenance year after year.
We were literally able to identify over $100,000 of saving for one customer after the first month of monitoring”
- Billy Strickland, Vice President |
Additionally, in 2006 Combest achieved the Small and Medium-sized Business Select Partner designation from Cisco Systems, which demonstrated to their customers that they understood and supported solutions for small and medium-sized business markets.
Since then, Combest has expanded their relationship with Tone Software and deepened their ReliaTel-based offerings to now provide reporting as a value-add service to their customers. Using ReliaTel's extensive alarm, performance, capacity, and traffic reporting capabilities, Combest customers now have access to not only an industry-leading solution for network management, but also access to enhanced alarm, performance and capacity reporting that provides the critical information necessary to help ensure the success of their business.
|
Request Password/Upgrade
Online Support by Product