Art Innovators is a drawing-based International art program based in Diamond Bar, California. As art programming is being cut from school budgets across the country, Art Innovators is filling the gap with International programs for children of all ages.
As their program grew to thousands of children and parents, Art Innovators needed a telephone system that was easy to set up, affordable and had the flexible features their business model required. Their old phone system was a traditional punch-key PBX system that had been inherited from the previous tenant in the building, and simply transferring a call to another extension had a learning curve.
There were some fundamental communications challenges that the new phone system had to solve –
1) As Art Innovators grew more centers, there would have to be a centralized way for their participants to be able to call a toll free number and reach a live person regardless of the location of the center.
“Our current phone system couldn’t speak to the other office phone systems, so we had to have multiple toll free numbers dedicated to each office, making use of live humans answering the phones inefficient.”
2) While staff were often busy with teaching classes or administrative duties, inbound phone calls would often go to voicemail. With a growing amount of office-specific phone systems and no streamlined business process for checking voicemails, rapid growth of Art Innovators became an operational challenge as there was no centralized way to access voicemails for the entire company. The current phone system had a cumbersome manner of retrieving voicemails. Because customers often mistakenly called for one center and not the intended location, voicemails would often be left for the wrong office – resulting in lost messages or staff having to forward the message via email to the correct location.
3) Each office had their own dedicated fax line and fax machine. This led to increasing printing costs as well as consumed human resources to organize and resend documents.
Benefits of Cloud Phone Systems
Art Innovators decided to go to a modern cloud-based telephony service from Halloo. Not only could they use their existing phone system, but all the features they desired to fit their operational goals were delivered as a service – so there were no hardware or software products they needed to purchase as an upfront capital expenditure.
It also meant that they could fulfill –
Toll Free Numbers Tied to Distributed Calling
With just a single toll free number, Art Innovators’s customers can reach different offices or different departments. Calls to an operator extension can ring multiple offices until a live human picks up – ensuring the best customer service experience while maximizing human resources across all locations.
Art Innovators simply bought a toll free number on Halloo.com, then uploaded a voice greeting straight from their existing phones, and then went online to choose which existing phone lines they wanted the extensions to forward to.
“The entire process took 15 minutes.”
Virtual Voicemail Gone Digital
Implementing Halloo’s Enhanced Virtual Business Voicemail Service also meant that voicemails left by customers could now be checked by anyone, anywhere. The voicemails could also be checked online to ensure the best customer experience and that all customers got called back in a timely manner.
Before Halloo, voicemails left for one department inadvertently had to be transcribed manually onto an email by a staff member and then sent to the intended department or recipient. With Halloo, Art Innovators are receiving their voicemails as emails, and as such can be forwarded with two mouse-clicks – saving the staff countless hours each
week.
No More Paper Faxes
While it had been hard to quantify, Art Innovators knew they were spending a good amount of time and human resources on receiving inbound faxes and storing them. Each individual office and department had their own fax line and fax machine, and organizing documents was becoming burdensome as they grew.
With Halloo’s Business Digital Fax Service, Art Innovators has a dedicated single fax line that not only stores documents for all locations and departments, but now faxes are sent as images in emails. So faxed documents can be organized and stored permanently, as well as being forwarded to other departments like Accounting with
ease.
“We definitely saw in Halloo the easiest, most cost-effective way to streamline our business communications on one service. The fact that we could use our existing phone systems and have them all tied into our toll free number and our faxes continues to be one of our operational backbones.”