Anthony Sylvan Pools

Anthony & Sylvan Pools is among America’s largest installers of custom-designed, in-ground concrete residential swimming pools and spas. The company provides homeowners with new pool and spa installations, modernization of existing pools, equipment, service, supplies, and backyard extras. Anthony & Sylvan installs among the highest number of swimming pools of any company in the growing U.S. market, with more than 360,000 in-ground swimming pools installed over the past 60 years.

“...the old system didn’t allow the transfer of calls between offices — we’d have to ask customers dialing the wrong location to hang up and dial another number, which is frustrating. The ShoreTel system solved a significant business problem.”
— Tony Pizzelanti, Vice President of Information Technology, Anthony & Sylvan.

With its 50 sites using a mix of Mitel, small key systems, and Centrex systems, as well as voicemail capabilities at only some of the sites, it was the right time to consider a full, company-wide VoIP solution. Anthony & Sylvan evaluated 15 different network vendors and also considered managed offerings. The company placed priority on ease of implementation and operation, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. Anthony & Sylvan spoke with customers of each vendor, watched product demonstrations, tested the solutions, and conducted extensive up-front return on investment (ROI) analyses.

“ShoreTel was able to deliver a cost-effective solution with the same robust architecture to both our small and large locations. This architecture provided local presence for emergency 911, which other solutions would not be able to support without making major architecture changes. ShoreTel’s cost effectiveness, and their ability to sell and support our system directly, fit into how we do business.”
— Tony Pizzelanti, Vice President of Information Technology, Anthony & Sylvan.

Anthony & Sylvan chose ShoreTel for its advanced technology, rich feature set, support for the organization’s hub-and-spoke architecture, and ability to be managed in-house. The deployment included ShoreTel 40, 60, 120, and T1 Voice Switches, and nearly three hundred ShoreTel IP Phones of varying models. Currently, all of Anthony & Sylvan’s employees are on the ShoreTel system. Benefits include:

• Minimized costs and reduced toll charges with the ability to consolidate T-1 lines and leverage least-cost call routing capabilities.
• Easy-to-configure auto-attendant is built in, so customers can easily select a destination or search the directory by name.
• ShoreTel Core Software includes a powerful voice messaging system, including user-configurable call handling options and find-me routing. The voice messaging system can be accessed visually from ShoreTel Call Manager or the user’s Microsoft^® Outlook^® inbox.
• When Hurricane Rita forced a temporary shutdown of the Houston office, the auto-attendant feature made it easy to implement a custom schedule so callers dialing those locations received a special greeting.

ShoreTel’s Call Manager has a Windows-style interface that was very familiar to our users, and the integration to Microsoft Outlook worked better than every other solution we considered. Our employees found it very easy to use — some were a little tentative at first but once they started using it, they loved it."
— Tony Pizzelanti, Vice President of Information Technology, Anthony & Sylvan.