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With offices in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, The James G. Elliott Co., Inc. is the nation’s largest national outsourced media ad sales company for print and digital publishers and organizations. The Elliott Company also provides consulting services for midsize to Fortune 500 companies seeking to explore new revenue opportunities through advertising sales.
Voice system or Internet access outages—frequent in New York and sometimes lasting days—could result in loss of voicemail and call routing capability, or even a fast-busy signal. “We act on behalf of our Fortune 500 clients in media sales, so when phones or connectivity were down, it reflected poorly on us and our clients,” explains Jim Elliott, President, James G. Elliott Company. “Missed calls also meant lost sales.” The Elliott Company sought an affordable yet reliable solution that would ensure business continuity.
Working with MegaPath partner The Lab Information Services, James G. Elliott selected MegaPath SD-WAN Enterprise with business Internet access and Hosted Voice. Now outages and Voice system issues are a thing of the past. If the primary Internet connection goes down, the failover service switches to a backup Internet access service temporarily, to keep voice and other business applications up and running. “The number one concern of a business owner is having business services that work,” says Elliott. “MegaPath Voice and Internet services work reliably for us. It’s a sort of ’set it and forget it,’ and that’s exactly what we need.”
“By selecting the MegaPath SD-WAN Enterprise service, we trust that we will be able to serve our customers with maximum quality and without any downtime,” says Elliott. “MegaPath helped us design a solution that fits our business goals as well as our budget. And now, with the MegaPath RED 100% uptime guarantee, you can’t go wrong.”
Desk phones, including touch screen Polycom VVX 500 models used by executives, offer High-Definition (HD) voice. “Our New York office gets a lot of street noise, but callers don’t hear it, because the handsets suppress the background noise,” says Elliott. “We can’t quite say that the MegaPath phones have quieted New York City, but the calling experience is phenomenal.”
MegaPath Hosted Voice supports The Elliott Company’s mobile work style. Everyone can manage preferences for call behavior by logging into Voice Manager, an easy-to-use self-service voice management portal. For example, they can set their business calls to automatically forward to a home phone or smartphone. Elliott, an L.A. native who spends one week a month in the New York office, says, “My phone is set up so that changing just one setting in Voice Manager forwards my calls to me at my New York desk phone, on my mobile phone, or anyplace in between. That’s the kind of ease of use I like.”
“MegaPath Voice is an incredibly efficient and convenient way to work.”
–Jim Elliott, President
James G. Elliott Company
The company plans to adopt MegaPath Unified Communications. Offering five real-time collaboration tools including voice/video calling, presence, IM, screen share, and SMS texting in one convenient application available on a wide range of devices, MegaPath UC helps far-flung teams stay connected. “We want to bring employees’ mobility and collaboration experience to the next level. UC will do that,” says Vicor Avalos, of The Lab Information Services.
While other providers’ Voice systems require users to memorize codes or access a complicated interface to set up call forwarding, users of MegaPath Voice Manager simply answer a few simple questions.
Users can also set preferences for voicemail with a few clicks or taps in Voice Manager. They can re-set their own voicemail PIN and manage how voicemail is delivered—as an audio file or transcribed into text—both of which can be accessed in Voice Manager or delivered to an email Inbox, or both.
James G. Elliott prides itself on being easy to do business with, and the company expects the same of its vendors. In the past, working with separate local providers in its three locations complicated vendor management. “In the largest metro areas, service providers treated us like small fish in a big pond,” says Elliott. “However, MegaPath values our business and treats us like we matter. MegaPath is big enough to serve all of our locations nationwide, yet small enough to deliver personal, highly responsive service.”
