Digium Switchvox: Different Things to Different Businesses

Guest Blogger: Randy Kremlacek, president, Teledynamic Communications

We’ve sold traditional Nortel phone systems since 1987 and 3Com phone systems since 1999. We could see the writing on the wall in 2009 and decided to replace those two manufacturers with Digium’s Switchvox. In what we thought was a bold and somewhat risky move, has come to become one of our best business decisions we’ve ever made.

In the past, we (just like our fellow traditional PBX competitors) had to make the Nortel or 3Com product fit into every business. If a customer needed something a little special that was always a big deal and a big expense. Expensive licenses, dedicated servers and complicated installations would make the solution painfully expensive. Not so, with our new PBX Swiss army knife, Digium’s Switchvox.

Recently, we installed a system at a local taxi cab company, an organization with tremendous incoming calls.  They wanted to do a database lookup and present the call with the client record. They also wanted to record their calls. A day’s worth of set up and they had their solution.  Their alternative was a traditional PBX at $10,000 more.

We had another customer who wanted to change their call handling for their outside sales and service reps. Before Digium, the outside reps would give their personal cell phone numbers to customers.  That presented many problems; the most significant one is that the company was completely out of the loop in call handling and customer communications. We were able to deploy a Switchvox system and now all the incoming customer calls go through the company PBX where they get re-routed automatically.  And mobile employees are enjoying their newfound communications capability with Switchvox’s mobile application for iPhones.

We’ve also come to the rescue of many an unhappy hosted customer. They nearly jump up and kiss us when we tell them that they can re-use their existing phones on Switchvox. None of the proprietary manufacturers can do that natively. Plus, they are pleasantly surprised to learn that they get the same powerful features as they did from their hosted provider, but without the big monthly bill.

Then there are the customers that buy (no, “insist on”) a product that is based on the SIP standard and is not hardware intensive. The PBX is rapidly becoming just another application on the network and Switchvox fits right into that overall shift from proprietary to a communications application.

Lastly, we’ve installed several Switchvox systems for customers who don’t care a bit about technology, standards or sophisticated features. For those Digium customers, they value the affordable price, flexibility, ease of administration and the wide variety of phones from which to choose.

In short, Switchvox can be many things to many companies – a powerful unified communications platform, an inexpensive customizable PBX or just a no frills telephone system. We and our customers love it!