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Often the issue is I want to put my daughter in Girl Scouts but I can't
find a troop can you help me?
If they can't reach a human being they can't be helped.
I'm Andrea Bride and I'm Chief Financial Officer for Girl Scouts Northern California.
Girl Scouts of Northern California was formed in October of 2007.
When 5 non- profit Girl Scout Councils, all separate corporations, came together.
We have 47,000 girl members, 32,000 adult
members and trying to find ways to connect all of them since our merger has
been a really interesting challenge for us.
Our previous phone system was 5 different systems.
So just handling moves, adds and changes and getting people trained
and trying to support those systems was a huge challenge.
The chief consideration was looking for a system that had low overhead. We brought in Cisco, Avaya
and Mitel and ShoreTel.
A lot of the vendors you can see had a lot of
legacy architecture that they brought forward.
The ShoreTel system really was simple
in its implementation and support.
When we looked at
the range of needs that we identified ShoreTel made the list and
certainly from a financial point of view, I did the analysis and it was a great solution for us.
One of the greatest benefits we have is the extension mobility. We have people
traveling between offices
as well as our 20 offices in the state so staying connected being able to
forward their extensions to
a land line or a cell phone so they can stay connected is
really beneficial. The other great
piece of technology is the communicator being able to manage your phone right from your
computer.
Previously, with the old phone system
if someone was talking on the phone they were talking on the phone and you had to leave a message
and they may or may not have checked their messages. With ShoreTel if someone is on the
phone I know that but I can also IM them and Instant Message them and
they can answer me while they are talking on the phone with somebody. So it makes things a lot smoother
and if I need an instant answer I can get an instant answer. Its ability to integrate
with Microsoft Outlook in some cases to convert voice to text was a
wonderful benefit. So you can be on a conference call and see when your
ShoreTel pops up
hat you have a call coming in and you can make a decision on whether I want it to go
to voicemail or answer it or how I'm going to respond.
So from our staff side it's been a wonderful benefit too.
The ShoreTel system has really allowed us to focus on supporting
our office staff and not have to manage a phone system.
If a colleague were interested in a new phone system I would tell them to jump on
the ShoreTel solution. The implementation and the management has
a low IT overhead
so it allows us to focus more on supporting our other council needs.