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As the world’s largest helicopter flight training operation, Silver State Helicopters couldn’t afford to have its aggressive growth plans grounded by an antiquated call center operation. Anxious to turn phone responses from its advertising efforts into hot leads for student pilots, Silver State decided to dump its outsourced call center provider and take the operations 100% in-house.

But first the company had to find the ideal phone system, one that would not only make its call center operations hum, but would also have the IP phone capabilities and features Silver State required.

“The AltiGen system turned out to be exactly what we needed,” says Steve King, IT manager at Las Vegas-based Silver State. “It has vastly increased our productivity and our efficiency, no doubt about it.”

Installed by Capture Technologies, Inc., a leading AltiGen Communications reseller, the entire call center deployment took less than three days, including a seamless integration with Microsoft CRM, King notes. “The best part is that after the installation, there is very little asked of the IT department here to support the call center system,” he says. “Call center managers can handle recording of prompts,changing screens, changing autoattendant features, you name it. This is a highly intuitive phone system with built-in commands that puts the call center staff in control and frees up our IT people to do other important work.”

SUCCESS BREEDS SUCCESS
John Babin, the vice president of communications solutions at Capture Technologies, says the inherent flexibility of the AltiGen phone systems allows users like Silver State to easily fine-tune the systems to their precise specifications. For example, Silver State is now able to inform call center staff of the exact geographical market from where the call is originating. Then the staff member’s screen can be populated with various offers and upselling opportunities geared for that specific area.

At Silver State, the call center installation went so well that thecompany soon rolled out AltiGen’s IP phone system to the accounting department. Today that IP capability stretches across all major departments and across multiple office suites at Silver State. The company is also adding 100 corporate office users to a new AltiGen IP system, which will be easily linked to other AltiGen systems. The corporate connection will have added features like four-digit dialing between offices and a single phone number with which to reach Silver State’s mobile workforce no matter where business takes them.

In addition, Silver State is rolling out smaller branch office AltiGen systems in its local flight school offices, replacing antiquated PBX solutions. AltiGen will be the system of choice in new local offices as Silver State continues its expansion across the country.

“In the last few years, we’ve gone from one flight school with 20 students to 22 schools with over 1,700 students enrolled,” King says. “Bringing our call center and other phone operations in-house with AltiGen has allowed us to take control of the sales process. It has greatly increased the rate of actual signups from initial calls, meaning we get more bang for the buck from our advertising. And the IP capabilities have made everyone’s life more productive.”