Boston Ballet School

Now in its 41st season, Boston Ballet has built an international reputation for dancing as well as for its education and outreach programs. The Boston Ballet School is the largest in North America, serving over 2,000 students in three locations. Behind the school and every performance, a staff of about 120 handles everything from ticket sales to marketing to costume design. Ensuring that everything runs smoothly depends on seamless communication. The phone system is a critical part of the school’s behind-the-scenes efforts and its service to the public.

“In the past, it was very rare that a customer would call in and immediately get the person they needed to speak to.”
- Michael Kernochan, IT Coordinator, Boston Ballet.

Boston Ballet’s phone system offered little flexibility for handling calls, managing voicemail, and adding extensions as the company’s needs changed throughout the year, particularly during productions. Moreover, the outdated system consumed a significant part of the school’s annual budget, requiring ongoing costs for maintenance and support from outside vendors. Boston Ballet needed a phone system that could keep up with employees and dancers constantly moving among the office, school, and theater, and which would help them communicate with each other and parents, particularly during productions.

“ShoreTel Workgroups have been infinitely helpful with routing traffic. When ‘The Nutcracker’ season rolls around each year, Boston Ballet easily configures the system with a Nutcracker information hotline.”
- Michael Kernochan, IT Coordinator, Boston Ballet.

The ShoreTel solution’s ease of deployment and use, lower total cost of ownership, and flexible unified communications features convinced the Boston Ballet. The new IP phone system consists of ShoreTel 60 and 120 Voice Switches, which run an embedded, real-time operating system and one T1 interface unit. The T1 interface allows Boston Ballet to eliminate a significant number of individual POTS lines and consolidate service onto a single, cost-effective, and reliable circuit. At the school, Boston Ballet installed a switch connected to a 512K frame-relay circuit used to carry existing data traffic. There, Boston Ballet was able to eliminate five $180 per-month OPX lines. Benefits include:

• Boston Ballet reduced its monthly phone bill by almost 50 percent by cutting the number of lines it needed.
• Staff who are not in the office call the system remotely to redirect calls to their homes or mobile devices.
• ShoreTel Core Software includes a powerful voice messaging system with 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.
• During productions, the system’s advanced features allow the Boston Ballet to handle an increasing number of calls and extensions, forwarding call to other phones as the crew moves among the school, offices, and theater.
• The box office takes advantage of ShoreTel workgroup features to round-robin calls among the staff and ensure that patrons reach the next available customer service representative to purchase tickets. 
• The ShoreTel system saves Boston Ballet, a non-profit organization, $30,000- $40,000 annually.

“In my career so far, the ShoreTel phone system is easily the best I’ve seen. Administration and management of moves, adds, and changes is a breeze — all possible from a single graphical user interface.”
- Michael Kernochan, IT Coordinator, Boston Ballet.