Combest Communications, headquartered in Georgia, provides voice, data, video and wireless solutions from Avaya, Cisco, and Mitel, as well as comprehensive services to manage and maintain their clients’ business-critical communications environments.

“With shrinking profit margins on hardware, our goal was to place a bigger emphasis on service revenue as a way to continue to grow our business.” stated Billy Strickland, Vice President for Combest. “To do that, we felt a state-of-the-art remote management solution would give us the competitive advantage we needed to accomplish our goal,” he added.

After considerable research, Combest selected ReliaTel as the solution to manage their worldwide customer’s traditional PBXs, voice mail servers, VoIP infrastructure, data switches, routers, and voice applications from Avaya, Nortel, Mitel, Cicso, and others.

ReliaTel provided Combest with the key to accomplishing their goal - flexibility - the flexibility to remotely monitor multi vendor telecommunications equipment, as well as other devices in their customer’s environments such as CSUs, Switches, Routers, UPSs, and more.

Combest's Service and Support Center can now quickly and efficiently respond to alarms and service outages utilizing ReliaTel. Using a variety of different notification mechanisms including email, pager, phone, audio and visual alerts, Combest Service and Support Center personnel are now quickly made aware of problems and provided the information needed to quickly resolve those problems.

“The competition couldn't provide the flexibility we needed to respond to our customer problems quickly and efficiently,” Mr. Strickland reported. “ReliaTel allows us to diagnose problems quickly and get the right technician working on the problem within minutes. As a result, we’ve been able to reduce our Mean Time to Repair by 27%,” he added.

Another key Combest objective was to demonstrate the value their service delivers to their customers. Through ReliaTel's reporting facility, Combest provides their customers with meaningful information and recommendations to operate their voice environment more efficiently.

For example, ReliaTel’s performance reports collect statistics from PBXs and provide recommended trunking levels. These reports have allowed Combest to identify hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings for their customers by reducing the number of under-used active trunks.

“The savings we have identified for our customers has built the kind of loyalty that keeps our customers on maintenance year after year,” Mr. Strickland commented. “We were literally able to identify over $100,000 of savings for one customer after the first month of ReliaTel monitoring and reporting,” he concluded.

ReliaTel has helped Combest accomplish their mission of increasing service revenue and customer satisfaction, which has resulted in continued success and business growth for Combest.