Community Bank & Trust

Community Bank & Trust is a growing bank with strong community roots and a mission to meet or exceed customer expectations. Founded in 1989 by fourteen Sheboygan investors who felt a need for a locally owned and operated independent bank, the bank has grown to over $500 million in assets, eleven branch offices, and more than 250 employees.

“We were unable to move employees from one workstation to another without having an outside vendor come in to re-wire.”
— Sheila Genske, IT Trainer and Telecommunications Specialist, Community Bank & Trust.

In early 2004, Community Bank & Trust was growing rapidly both by adding new locations and growing established branches. With different telephone systems in each branch, including systems from 3Com, AT&T, Avaya, and Lucent, the organization was not able to centralize communications and employees had different features depending on their location. With no consistency across sites, adding new offices was very difficult. The bank sought a cost-effective solution that offered superior ease of use and management, and reporting functionality.

ShoreTel provided a complete IP-based unified communications solution for all of the bank’s 12 locations. At the heart of its hardware component are 10 ShoreTel 120 Voice Switches, two ShoreTel T1 switches for the corporate office and a branch, as well as one ShoreTel 60 and three ShoreTel 40s. In addition, the bank has deployed over 300 ShoreTel IP Phones, including 100 and 530/560 models. ShoreTel’s Workgroups feature enables the bank to consolidate inquiry calls to one number per workgroup for customer service, loan operations, and more. Incoming calls simply route to the next available member. Workgroups’ reporting capabilities enable the bank to direct resources where they are most needed. Other benefits include:

• All bank employees are now on the same phone and voicemail system organization-wide, which IT staff can manage from anywhere with ShoreTel Director’s Web-based interface.
• Employees spend less time playing phone tag and catch-up, and more time on what really matters. With ShoreTel Call Manager, their communications, enterprise applications, calendaring, and workflow applications are integrated into one seamless environment.
• The open, distributed platform integrates seamlessly with legacy systems, so the bank’s small group of Citrix users can transfer their extensions to their Citrix workstations while still accessing voicemail and ShoreTel’s unified communication features.

“To bring online the branch we most recently added, everything took about a day — from hooking up phone lines, putting in the ShoreTel gear, and deploying the phones. This would’ve taken us at least one full business week with the old system.”
— Sheila Genske, IT Trainer and Telecommunications Specialist, Community Bank & Trust.