Feature Story

Tri-State Water Treatment, Inc. installs systems and provides services to improve the quality of water and air in its customers' homes. Established in 1992, Tri-State Water started in Cape Girardeau, Missouri with 11 employees. Business more than doubled in the first six months, and two years later Tri-State opened a second location. Today, Tri-State Water employs about 65 full-time employees, and often hires additional staff to handle outbound sales calls.

With no time to update many processes used since the company opened, management was scrambling to keep up with company growth and fixing problems with patchwork solutions.

"We had outdated network infrastructure, old phones, and a paper-and-pencil sales process," says Josh Waller, IT Director for Tri-State Water. "Sales leads were written on cards, passed onto telemarketing agents who had no computers, and we assigned sales reps by drawing lines on a map. We printed 3 or 4 hundred pieces of paper every day that were thrown away within 24 hours." Marketing and sales were not automated, and the old PBX phone system caused all phones throughout the office to ring all day long.

Tri-State President Donny Beasley was interested in new technology and how it might improve sales and customer service, and streamline business processes. Waller and his team started investigating local solutions companies that could help improve the company's internal and external communications with a network infrastructure. They chose Cisco Partner AOS Global Solutions, feeling that its SMB Select designation and Gold Partner status made it the right fit for TriState's needs.

"They had experience putting in a lot of successful solutions," says Waller. "They had good knowledge of how to scale small business network infrastructure but because we do significant sales and installations of water treatment systems made by a large company, we wanted to work with someone who also understood bigger, enterprise solutions."

AOS Global, which holds Cisco specializations in IP Communications, Security and Wireless, has real strength in developing total IT solutions. With demonstrated expertise in systems consultation, design and implementation, as well as product sales and service, it delivers small business solutions that result in lower total cost of ownership for its customers.

"TriState has some technology visionaries and knew what they wanted to accomplish," says Matt Oliver, channel manager for AOS Global. "But didn't know what technology would get themthere. That's our job." Global AOS conducted demonstrations showing application development on top of a Cisco IP solution. It took some effort to convince management to invest in a Cisco solution, which was more expensive than other solutions they were considering.

"TriState Water had never invested this heavily in technology before," says Oliver. "To help soften the sticker shock, we prepared spreadsheets to show management how quickly the money would be recouped through higher productivity and better management of inbound and outbound sales. We showed a short return on investment and then it was an easy sell from there."

Today, no one even thinks of the price of the Cisco solution according to Waller. "I haven't heard anyone mention the price of this phone system in months. It helped us bring our business to a new level - that's what people are talking about," he says, adding that savings can be realized in places people aren't used to looking at, such as calls to other branch offices.

"We didn't look at that closely at first, but Matt brought it to our attention and it's huge," he says. "Now we can overhead page or call via an extension. Not only is it more cost-effective, it really helps unify the company."

At TriState Water Treatment, AOS Global Solutions deployed Cisco IP telephony to improve communications, Cisco Call Manager and Unity voicemail. Key to the overall solution was AOS Global development of custom XML applications that ride on top of the Cisco IP solution to further improve communication across the internal network and to customer prospects. The application allows new sales leads to be loaded daily or weekly into the marketing department call center, and leads can be easily assigned to a sales person. Set questions asked to all sales leads can be entered right into the phone via the soft key buttons, and then tracked via a SQL database. The development of these applications reduced or eliminated completely the paper processes, and now all sales leads are backed up on the network.

"Before this solution we were shuffling three-by-five cards, and sales agents spent most of their time just trying to get through to a valid phone number," says Waller. "Now they reach twice as many valid, targeted sales leads, and focus more on their scripting and sales instead of trying to hit a valid phone number." Employees outside the sales department like how easily they can retrieve and forward voicemails, and now no one's phone is ringing all day long unanswered.

Seeing the technology pay such big dividends, both in cost-savings and productivity improvement, is all in a day's work for the staff at AOS Global. By understanding the issues and concerns of a small business, it has found real success in the SMB market.

"Small businesses care that you're not going to disrupt their business activities while deploying a system, and they can't have any data loss because it's an enormous impact on a small business," says Oliver. "SMBs are looking for ways to be more productive while keeping employee labor down."