Two Sydney SMBs save $9000 per year

Moving on training and Dolomites Ski Tours, two small businesses based in Mona Vale in Sydney’s northern beaches have been victims of their own success.
Following steep growth, both businesses – owned and operated by local entrepreneur Greg Edwards – found themselves in need of an efficient, reliable and integrated voice and data network.

“We were looking for a way of best rationalising all of our telecommunications, we had different phone numbers for different businesses; it was a mess,” said Edwards.

He approached Linksys to discuss the benefits of the Linksys Voice System (LVS).

“The Linksys hardware just seemed to be the best way to do it. We knew if we went for Linksys, we would dramatically reduce our costs. We are saving about $9000 a year where we were spending $12,000 a year on calls,” he added.

According to Edwards, not only did Linksys’ LVS save his businesses money, but also enhanced customer service capabilities.

“The outdated analogue system used prior to Linksys made it impossible to differentiate which calls were for what business and also made it difficult to direct calls to the right person.

“This systems gives us control over where calls go, who takes them and even with our remote offices, we can route calls wherever we want. Depending on the call, we can direct it to a specific handset allocated to a business.”.

Even though Edwards’ businesses involve plenty of overseas travel, he said the system helps him to keep sales coming in even when he’s not there.
“The nature of one of our businesses means that we are doing a great deal of overseas travel – about four months a year,” Edwards said.
“With Linksys, you can set the system up so that even if there is no one in the office, and someone tries to call – an email will be sent to my computer in Italy or overseas. The email will have a .wav file attached to it so that I can actually hear those voice messages!”

The solution

Linksys value-added reseller, Go Systems, provided and installed a multi-line business service to deliver on the customer’s needs. The answer for Greg Edwards was a hosted PBX platform utilising Linksys hardware, and powered by service provider Comvergence.

What attracted Edwards to the LVS were the new Voice-Over-IP (VoIP) phone solutions that provided high quality and multiple features designed specifically for small businesses.