With Rogers Unison, snowboard company on track everywhere
For decades, Canadian businesses large and small have been chained to their landline office phone system. That is no longer the case, as Rogers Communications allows clients to literally cut the cord of their desktop phones with the introduction of Rogers Unison.
Unison allows businesses to utilize the best features and benefits of legacy onenumber office phone systems with their employees’ handheld phones, laptops, tablets and, yes, even desk phones if preferred. Benefits include keeping that all- important business phone number and an automated answering and call forwarding system.
The advantages of Rogers Unison were immediately apparent to Endeavor Design Inc. co- founder Max Jenke, whose six-person team spends much of its time visiting customers and factories or testing its products on mountain slopes.
“It made total sense for us and it was a solution that we had been looking for,” says Jenke, a former pro snowboarder. “We wanted to get rid of our office line because no one answered it. It was foreign to us having desk lines when we are so used to having cellphones.”
Vancouver-based Endeavor, a designer and manufacturer of specialty snowboard and related outdoor products, has been using Unison since July and the benefits are apparent in faster customer service. The majority of calls come from its network of more than 700 specialty snow retailers in North America, so it is important that they are accessible.
Most incoming calls are routed to four of six employees, which means that in most cases customers are able to speak immediately with an Endeavour staffer or receive a prompt email response.
“For a team that is rarely in the office, it’s made us far more accessible,” says Jenke. “In fact, we are trying to do as much as we can through email and missed calls pop up as a visual voice mail, and that is great for our record keeping.”
The savings from Unison can be substantial. Small businesses, for example, spend an average of $ 25 to $ 50 a month for each landline. With Rogers Unison, they can save at least 40 per cent when they replace their desk phones with Rogers Unison on a Share Everything for Business plan. The average savings they’d expect to see would be $300 to $600 a year for each landline eliminated. As well, the solution can be set up within minutes, with no application or software installation required.
For Endeavor, the adoption of Rogers Unison allowed it to ditch obsolete desktop phone systems that employees never used or felt comfortable with over the six years of the company’s existence.
“The second that we made the move to Unison, we just recycled those old desk phones,” says Jenke.
Launched for small businesses earlier this year, Rogers Unison is now available for medium, large and public-sector organizations that are seeking a communica- tions solution that is right for employees, whether they are in the office or working remotely.
The solution is part of a larger focus that Rogers has set to grow its business in the enterprise space and to deliver solutions to businesses that will improve productivity and the way they work.
Unique features of Unison include auto attendant (a fully automated answering system that greets customers and directs their calls to the correct destination); hunt groups (which routes incoming client calls between team members, ensuring customers are never left on hold); dual persona (adds local line number to employees’ mobile devices and adds new numbers for new business regions); voice mail to email (instantly sends audio files of customer messages when no one is available to speak with them directly), and simultaneous ring (directs calls to multiple devices at the same time, ensuring customers can always reach a team member).