Better Business Bureau

Every day, thousands of consumers turn to the Better Business Bureau (BBB) for unbiased information. The Eastern Massachusetts BBB office is one of about 130 BBB offices in North America, maintaining files on businesses headquartered in the eastern Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island, and Vermont areas. Effective communications with the public and BBB-accredited businesses are mission-critical as they advance trust, honesty, transparency, and responsiveness in marketplace transactions.

“We looked at upgrading the old system, but both short-term and long-term costs were exorbitant.”
—Deanna Liberti, Vice President of Operations, Eastern Massachusetts BBB.

The BBB’s phone system was becoming increasingly expensive to maintain, and with offices in three locations and remote employees, the BBB was not able to consolidate all users on onesystem. In addition to integrating communications between their offices, the BBB also wanted a communications backbone to support its growing number of remote workers, and to support an important part of the organization’s daily operation — its two call centers. One call center receives consumer complaints and inquiries, and the other makes about 100 calls a day to invite businesses to apply for BBB accreditation.

“Excellent customer service is vital to the benefit of our customers and we wanted to be able to monitor our agents’ calls on a daily basis, as well as closely manage these groups so we can improve their efficiency.”
— Deanna Liberti, Vice President of Operations, Eastern Massachusetts BBB.

Boston-based ShoreTel partner, Barry Electric and Communications, was in the process of providing the BBB office with a new WAN, and suggested the IT team take a look at ShoreTel. Seeing how IP Connect Managed Services and the ShoreTel system could collectively reduce communication expenses from $10,000 to $5,600 per month, the BBB installed two ShoreTel 50 Voice Switches and one ShoreTel 90 Voice Switch at the main office, along with a ShoreTel 50 at each of the remote sites, and a total of 80 ShoreTel IP Phones. The co-location site has two ShoreTel T1K voice switches and houses the ShoreTel Application Server and a ShoreTel VPN Concentrator. Benefits include:

• ShoreTel’s distributed architecture gave Barry Communications the flexibility to implement a highly available system with a co-location facility that ensures calls get through, even in the event of a disaster.
• With ShoreTel Call Manager’s workgroups application, the BBB can effectively manage each center, while rich reporting features enable them to direct resources where they are most needed.
• After switching from Microsoft^® Outlook^®, the organization was able to import the Outlook contacts into ShoreTel Call Manager, and integrate them with Google Gmail. Employees can now see and listen to voicemail using their Gmail interface.
• Since there is no receptionist at the BBB, all inbound calls initially go to the automated call distribution menu system and are then routed to the correct department, so callers are connected more quickly.

“The features in the ShoreTel system met all of our needs for a modern, high performance communications system.”
— Deanna Liberti, Vice President of Operations, Better Business Bureau.