Combest's mission is to generate outstanding customer satisfaction and deliver a superior level of service through comprehensive remote monitoring and management of diverse, converged voice 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 voice network management solution would give us the competitive advantage we needed to accomplish our goal,” he added.

Diverse Communications Requirements - One Solution

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 throughout the environment 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.

Delivering Communications Value and ROI

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

For example, ReliaTel’s performance reports collect statistics from PBXs and IP voice switches to provide recommended trunking levels. These reports have allowed Combest to identify hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings 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 with us 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.

In addition, Combest uses ReliaTel to obtain the actionable data necessary to ensure voice quality, availability, and service delivery in the diverse converged environments they manage.

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.