Case Study: Infinite – Flexible, Reliable & Easy to Use Who Could Ask for Anything More?
While ease of use is the main thing that convinced executives at Alex Sheshunoff Management LP to try Infinite’s phone conferencing service, flexibility and reliability sealed a long-term business relationship.
The Austin, Texas-based consulting company provides services to community banks with $300 million to $10 billion in assets. Regional managers throughout the United States hold various meetings via conference call with co-workers and bank clients on a regular basis.
Dana Wilkes, support specialist at Alex Sheshunoff, said that prior to finding Infinite’s reservationless phone conferencing service, the company was working with an incredibly inefficient two-line in-house system worthy of a much smaller company. Plus, there was one individual responsible for keeping tabs on “reservations” for the two conference lines. If that person was out of the office, all bets were off.
“I can’t tell you how many times someone from our office here in Austin needed a conference line at the last minute, only to find out managers from around the country had either reserved them or jumped on them without reserving them. Or, someone from the West Coast would reserve the line and so would someone from another office and two people would be trying to access one line,” Wilkes explained. “It was so frustrating.”
But there is no more frustration at Alex Sheshunoff when it comes to conference calling. Infinite allows its clients to set up teleconferences without any reservations. You need to call a conference? Just send a group email with call-in number and entry code to anyone invited onto the call. By setting up a corporate account with Infinite, the company gets one bill at the end of each month with itemized charges for actual usage. There’s no setup fee and no monthly minimum charge.
With an easy-to-use, fully automated teleconferencing service, Wilkes said Alex Sheshunoff managers can hold internal “meetings” or conferences with clients in a time-efficient, cost-effective way.
In addition to its easy-to-use, affordable reservationless conferencing service, Infinite offers professional operators for an enhanced, more complicated teleconference. Infinite can help plan the audio conference and customize it to the client’s exact needs. A typical higher-level call, such as an earnings teleconference, might include the following enhancements by the operator: introduction of speakers, digital recording, facilitation of questions and answers and/or polling, sub-conferencing, and a post-call report of attendees.
“Infinite gives us a lot of flexibility. We can set up several conference entry codes for each of our departments. They all use the same dial-in number but different entry codes make the calls easier to track. The sales department, for example, has 13 entry codes. We even dedicate some of the codes for our smaller clients that don’t have their own conferencing capabilities,” Wilkes said.
“Infinite’s services are very reliable and the rates are so competitive,” she added. “ It’s so easy to set up new entry codes as we grow and the flexibility of this service makes it a really good fit for Alex Sheshunoff.”
Wilkes said her company is looking forward to possibly using the service to facilitate customer contact training sessions. Since some clients need specific training that others don’t, the company believes it can use its time and resources more wisely if training sessions become teleconferences that can be geared for smaller groups of people.
“Right now, we do training sessions on-site in conference rooms. The cost of renting the conference room for a couple of days, plus flight and hotel for the trainers is really a major expense,” she said. “With Infinite’s conference calls, we are hoping that we will save travel expenses and increase the amount of tailored training our customers receive.”
