Consolidated Technologies Helps Collection Agency with Avaya IP Telephony

For companies on the fast-track to growth, Consolidated Technologies Inc. (CTI) understands the need for a technology partner with the flexibility, confidence and capability to help them quickly respond to changing business conditions.

One of those growing companies is Immediate Credit Recovery, a New York- based debt collection agency specializing in student loans. To support its expanding operations and the critical systems required to compete in today’s market, the company needed a trusted solution provider and a powerful communications system like Avaya IP Office, a secure and easy-to-use converged voice and data system designed specifically for small and medium businesses (SMBs).

CTI delivers on all fronts, which is why it was named 2006 SMB BusinessPartner of the Year by Avaya. Avaya Inc. is a leading global provider of business communications applications, systems and services.

"Our business is very phone intensive," said Juan Bernardo, information technology manager, Immediate Credit Recovery. "It’s our bread and butter. Our previous system was expensive to maintain because of its age, so we decided it was time to upgrade and incorporate the capabilities we knew we would need in the future."

Those capabilities included IP telephony, a technology that will enable the company to add a new out-of-state location to its network as its business continues to grow-eliminating toll costs for intra-company calls. In the meantime, Immediate Credit Recovery is using the flexible IP telephony features of Avaya IP Office to connect telecommuters and mobile workers to its network so they can access the same robust communication features they have at the office.

"When our sales people and other team members work remotely, they typically use the Avaya IP Softphone application to dial into the network over their laptop computers," Bernardo said. "That means they can connect to any Wi-Fi hotspot and use the company network to make calls."

Since Immediate Credit Recovery relies heavily on its collection agents, the company uses the Compact Call Center capabilities of IP office to track call statistics, monitor performance and evaluate how to improve productivity. Bernardo said that generating reports and even programming the system is simple, as he discovered when he recently added 30 new ports to support expansion at the company’s headquarters.

"I didn’t know how our previous system was configured, let alone how to make changes," he said. "But with IP Office it’s simple. You simply plug in the phones, assign names to extension numbers and you’re done."

Consolidated Technologies integrated Avaya IP Office with Immediate Credit Recovery’s customer database, as well as with a call recorder used to document critical conversations and an automatic outbound dialer used for telemarketing. As a result, administrative changes made to the IP Office system are automatically shared with other applications.

"They gave us a full solution and we’re really happy with them," Bernardo said. "Their technicians are very accessible and they know the Avaya system inside out."