Ivory Homes, Utah's largest home builder, is a great example of a local company with multiple sites, remote locations, and people always on the go that need to stay in touch.

With three regional sales offices (Layton, Lehi and St. George) and the corporate headquarters in Salt Lake City, it is critical for their management team to be able to locate key staff members quickly, to collaborate between remote sites, and most importantly, make it easy for their customers and prospects to get to a sales consultant in the right area quickly.

The corporate office was installed first, with the Layton, Lehi and St. George offices coming online subsequently and in that order.

Christopher Strunk, Ivory's Manager of Information Technology, selected the Inter-Tel Communications platform for its ability to seamlessly link all of the sites over their point-to-point data network. Working with both Jan Carlston, a ProTel Senior Account Executive, and Dave Glissmeyer, ProTel's CEO, Christopher was able to deploy the all the tools to meet the communication requirements that Ivory Management had laid out for him.

With the communications challenges of a remote office in St. George and the expense of traveling for each meeting and planning session, Christopher came to ProTel for a great solution. ProTel installed a multi-point and cost effective video collaboration solution using Inter-Tel's Web Conferencing server. This technology enabled Ivory's staff to log into a browser and set up an online conference with interactive video and document sharing, any time they saw fit.

As with most large companies of this size and widespread footprint, keeping costs under control is vital to their success.

Ivory has been able to nearly eliminate long distance calls that take place between offices by using the Voice over IP networking that is native to the Inter-Tel platform.

Ivory also recently deployed Inter-Tel's Call/Contact Center Suite in order to measure incoming call traffic generated by their newspaper and TV ads. The Call Center software paid for itself very quickly with an ROI (Return on Investment) of less than 3 months. The data they received help them fine tune their print advertising and only spend money where it was being effective. In addition, the Call Center reports that identifies abandoned calls has allowed the sales staff to return phone calls of prospective buyers, even when they did not leave a message, by capturing the caller ID on all calls made to a particular sales office.

From Christopher's viewpoint "ProTel was a solid choice to begin with, and the work they have done for us over the years has done nothing but reinforce my initial recommendation. Their service and support is, by far, the best I have seen in many years. I have dealt with several vendors in several states and ProTel has outperformed them all by leaps and bounds."

You can reach Christopher at his DID (direct inward dial) number of 801.747.7070 for any additional questions. In addition, Ivory Homes and ProTel NetWorks have a "family and friends" marketing arrangement where any ProTel customer, employee or vendor can take advantage of attractive offers on a new home purchase in any of Ivory's 50+ communities along the Wasatch Front and in St. George. Christopher can give you more information when you call.