Headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio with a second location in Chicago, Illinois, Martin Healthcare Group has provided over 10 million hours of high quality healthcare services over the past 40+ years. With over 125 employees and over 200 independent contractors consisting of administrative staff, a variety of in-house and on-call physicians, hospital support staff, and dozens of employees hired to work off site, Martin Healthcare also has at least 20 partner locations and affiliates.

Headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio with a second location in Chicago, Illinois, Martin Healthcare Group has provided over 10 million hours of high quality healthcare services over the past 40+ years. With over 125 employees and over 200 independent contractors consisting of administrative staff, a variety of in-house and on-call physicians, hospital support staff, and dozens of employees hired to work off site, Martin Healthcare also has at least 20 partner locations and affiliates.

One of the well-known advantages of a Unified Communications (UC) phone system is Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology, which automatically distributes calls according to a set of customizable rules, based on a customer’s reason for calling. That redirection can send calls to a call center to place an order; to a bookkeeping department to pay a bill; to a customer service representative to discuss a problem; or in MHG’s case—to a live receptionist to talk to a nurse or doctor, regardless of their office location. “It was cost prohibitive for us to set up a network using the old system to connect everybody; and we couldn’t implement SIP trunks, which would save on long distance charges between Chicago and Cleveland and points in between,” says Brian Anderson, MHG’s IT Manager. He says having a live person answer every phone call during regular business hours was every bit as important as the costs associated with a new system, functionality, ease of use, and convenient features. After two years of patching together digital upgrades to the 25-year-old Toshiba, and constantly monitoring eBay for obsolete hardware parts, Anderson’s department felt they were within months of a catastrophic failure. “We had long outgrown the limited functionality of the key-based system, even with upgrades,” Anderson explains. “For instance, we added a voicemail module, which allowed us to get voicemail, but you had to be in the office to access it, and there was no remote notification capability.”

“Switchvox had all the key pieces we wanted,” says Anderson. “We could host it internally; we could flex back and forth between a live receptionist and the IVR after hours; it was easy to set up SIP trunks and a network we could share with remote employees, which eliminated long distance charges; it has mobile features; and voicemail-to-email with remote notifications.” It also has some features Anderson admits he wasn’t expecting, but that have proven to be very popular. “We were not planning to implement phone queues, but now that we have them, they help with routing and answering calls, which has been great,” he says. “We had in the past used Salesforce CRM software, but we were not relying heavily on it because of issues with the old system; and we had been using proprietary software for call reporting that was easy to integrate into Switchvox.” “We are relieved not to have to call someone in whenever we need to make even the slightest change,” says Anderson. “If we need to reroute phones, move them or add a new phone for an employee, in the office or at any of our remote locations, we can do it ourselves with almost no support. We are very happy with our Switchvox!”