Safeway Insurance Group

For over 45 years, Safeway Insurance Group has provided automobile insurance. Initially founded in 1962 to serve the greater Chicago metro area, the company has since expanded to include seven insurance companies in nine states, including Alabama, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. The organization is headquartered in Westmont, IL, in suburban Chicago, and maintains field offices in the states it serves.

“The support we’ve received from ShoreTel, right from the beginning, has been excellent.”
— Mike Leather, Network Services Manager, Safeway Insurance Group.

In 2005, Safeway Insurance Group was using a PBX-based analog telephone system. With the company’s rapid growth, the group would have needed to do a major system upgrade to meet its communication needs and unify its offices under one system. Seeking to take advantage of the many benefits of IP-based systems, the IT team conducted extensive research and narrowed down the candidates to Cisco and ShoreTel. Chief among the priorities for the new system were ease of use, the ability to manage the system from in-house, and integrated features that facilitate internal communications as well as those with customers.

“Some of our offices are small and don’t have a need to have an IT person on-site. The ease of management of the ShoreTel system saves us time and costs associated with traveling to remote offices to address phone issues.”

— Mike Leather, Network Services Manager, Safeway Insurance Group.

With the help of its integration partner, ShoreTel provided Safeway Insurance Group with two voicemail servers, one ShoreTel T1 Voice Switch for each of its 14 sites, and a range of ShoreTel 40, 60, and 120 Voice Switches deployed throughout all of its offices. More than 460 ShoreTel IP Phones completed the hardware component. ShoreTel’s unified communications platform brings employees across locations onto the same phone and voicemail system, enabling them to use four-digit dialing and dial-by-name to reach each other. In addition to an easy transition from the old system to the new, other benefits include:

• When Hurricane Katrina hit, the failover feature of the ShoreTel system made it easy to shift the phone service from the Group’s offices in the Gulf area. Calls were automatically routed to other offices so customers in Mississippi and Louisiana could be served.
• The presence and unified messaging features of ShoreTel Call Manager free employees to spend more time serving customers and less time playing phone tag.
• Just by launching ShoreTel Director’s Web-based browser, IT staff can manage every site and feature of the system, including voicemail, automated attendant, and desktop applications.
• ShoreTel Workgroup enables the creation of dedicated routing to such departments as customer support, claims and underwriting, technical support, and more. Workgroup supervisors can easily monitor agent and queue status to optimize resources.
• Safeway Insurance Group also utilizes the hunt group’s call routing capability to make sure that calls are answered by a person, not by voicemail.

“ShoreTel has been more cost-efficient from a management and maintenance standpoint. Overall, the system has been very well-received and we’re happy with our decision to go with ShoreTel.”
— Donna Jonynas, VP/CIO, Safeway Insurance Group.