Managed a 3CX solution with Blue Marble Communications redundant SIP Trunk for a trucking company in Chicago.
The company was facing 2 issues, high phone bill and an outdated system. They had already purchased a video surveillance system from us and wanted to update their phone system. They recently remodeled their dispatch center for 15 agent stations and a 2x8 video wall with 54" monitors. I suggested the 3CX System since that is the system we use in our office with hot desking. Agents change shifts and new agents use the same desk space. Hot desking allowed agents to log in to the dispatching queue and management wsa now able to track communications metrics of number of calls per hour, average time on call, call recording and number of incoming calls across all agents. The remaining parts of the office had an additional 30+ phones. What made this so interesting was they received quotes from Vonage, Comcast and smaller IP phone vendors that only offered a hosted solution that charges per seat. Since they had over 40+ phones in total all the hosted solutions were coming in over $1000 per month. I seamed absurd to pay monthly for break room, conference room, computer room, waiting room, drivers lounge and repair shop phones that rarely get used or only are used internally. I offered Blue Marble Communications, a company out of Wyoming, that offers the same system in both flavors, premise-based and hosted but uniquely charges by call paths over a SIP trunk. The call path model is similar to a PRI that uses channels. We use the same service at our office. The BMC model significantly reduced the monthly cost below $600 and offered more features such as DID failover routing, SMS Texting via Email and, if they wanted to, could add a redundant PBX out in the cloud. The other neat features of the 3CX are the IP Intercom overhead paging integration and access control for the front gate. A truck arrives and pushes the button on the intercom. The office staff setup in a ring group could answer the call and open the gate. The gate does have our access control for company trucks and video that displays on the video wall.
We compared, Avaya and Mitel for premise based but the cost was astronomical and the learning curve required you to be tied in with the vendor. Granted Blue Marble does offer us referral compensation and we use the same 3CX system in our office, it was not hard to convince the client based on cost, features and ease of use to go with 3CX. Blue Marble handled the install, porting and base configuration and we tweaked the system according to the clients needs.
I would have pushed for all new cabling. Since we did not do the initial cabling, we ran into strange issues with cable lengths, poor termination, cheap wire and older equipment. It seems that using existing infrastructure is less expensive but in the end, the client arrived to the same spot using a more costly route.
