Northside Mental Health Center Improves Business Communications, Eliminates IT Burdens

Whaleback Managed Services, the leader in managed business services, announced today that Northside Mental Health Center, a non-profit organization committed to serving Hillsborough County, Tampa, Florida area residents suffering from or at risk of mental illness, has chosen Whaleback's CrystalBlue Cloud-based Managed Voice Services and has improved business communications, eliminated IT burdens and saved time and money.

Northside's Director of Information Systems Bill Camp realized his communications innovation was failing. Northside serves more than 8,000 people per year with a staff of over 250 employees, four locations, and six residential buildings, and its community support center voicemail system was breaking down and needed resetting daily. The four locations' phone systems, bought at different times, were not integrated. With 70 percent of calls initiated from within Northside, internal calls were handled by a live operator, which was inefficient and often left callers with busy signals and no ability to connect. With a router failure that took the vendor two weeks to fix and an electronic medical records system deployment that required attention, Camp needed a better solution.

"My objective was to align research with Northside's business goals and strategies, and I had wanted to move to a Voice over IP system for some time nevertheless found it costly," said Camp. "All in all Whaleback's price included support and took the burden of support issues away from our IT staff. This was vastly different than what we were used to - in the past we had to drop everything and run if there was so much as a hiccup in any of our phone systems. Whaleback offered a phone number that anyone in the organization could call when there was an issue and Whaleback would help. Busy with implementing EMR, Whaleback's customer service was an important benefit for our IT department, as we didn't want to add any more IT responsibility."

To ensure a smooth and successful transition to Whaleback CrystalBlue services, Northside as well switched to high speed fiber optic Internet service from partner Bright House Networks. The sixth largest owner and operator of cable systems in the U.S., Bright House Networks offers a full suite of phone, Internet, Ethernet and cable television services to businesses of all sizes.

The security

"Bright House Networks provides the security and quality needed for advanced voice and data services through our state-of-the-art fiber network," said Nick Lenoci, Corporate Vice President, Business Solutions, Bright House Networks. "We are pleased to partner with Whaleback on improving business communications for the Northside Mental Health Center."

Whaleback Managed Services' total pricing for Northside's four centers was below the cost Camp had been paying for each separate system, and Camp has seen a 10-15 percent reduction in phone bills during experiencing virtually no down time using Whaleback.

Lot of time

"Whaleback saves us a lot of time," continued Camp. "Now calls from within and without of the organization are direct, with no operator required. Those operators now concentrate on other administrative tasks, and additional staff can now dial the person they want to speak with directly with just a four digit extension or direct dial, if away from the agency."

"Whaleback Managed Services has significantly helped employee morale as then," said Camp. "Everyone is thrilled at how easy the system is to use, its advanced features, and that they are no longer dragged down by a broken and time consuming communications system. Plus, they can take their phone with them if they change offices. Having a best-in-class system helps us attract the best talent in new hires too. The Whaleback approach has worked out so then that we've incorporated their support number into our staff training."

Feature-rich

CrystalBlue Cloud-based Managed Voice Services gives clients a feature-rich, high quality, enterprise-wide communications system without the expense or headache of installing and managing an on-premise PBX (Private -Automatic- Branch Exchange). Its features can be accessed anywhere, anytime from the Internet, mobile network or public telecommunications network. CrystalBlue integrates business-class telephony features, high-definition voice, network services, IP desk phones, messaging, collaboration, mobility, service guarantees, and redundancy with the simplicity of a cloud-based service and the quality and reliability of a robust enterprise system.

About Whaleback Managed ServicesWhaleback Managed Services is a leading provider of cloud-based managed business services for small and medium enterprises. Whaleback's end-to-end, business-class voice services enhance productivity and reduce operational and capital expenses by offering flexible, feature-rich VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) calling packages, proactive, centralized monitoring and management, and high-touch customer service. Whaleback's optimized cloud-based managed voice services are used by clients with single and multi-site environments in industries including retail, legal, financial, real estate, service, medical, construction, food, tourism and more. For more information about Whaleback Managed Services visit www.whalebacksystems.com