BACKGROUND
Post Properties, Inc. based out of Atlanta, GA is the preeminent developer and operator of upscale multi-family apartment communities in the Southeastern and Southwestern United States. With over 2,000 employees nationwide, Post Properties owns approximately 35,467 apartment homes in 104 communities, including 5,906 units currently under development.

THE CHALLENGE
Faced with a legacy voicemail system, with an outdated feature set, Post Properties did not have the functionality it needed from its messaging system. “Our previous voice mail system was just about 10 years old, so it did not provide us with the capabilities we needed to provide our customers with highest quality customer service they had come to expect from Post Properties,” said Carl Bonner of Post Properties.

Along with its rapidly expanding clientele, Post Properties has also seen a dramatic increase in communication exchanges between its employees and customers. There are a tremendous amount of voice, fax, and email messages coming and going. The company was in need of a solution, which would allow them to fully manage all of their messages from a central location, allowing them to be more productive in their message management and increasingly responsive to customers. Post Properties had already made an investment in Lotus Notes® as its messaging solution and they recognized that the Notes environment could be extended to manage voice and fax messages as well as email.

THE SOLUTION
Post Properties took their communication challenges to Data Voice, an AVST Corporation business partner, who presented the AVST CallXpress® unified messaging solution. CallXpress provides anywhere--anytime access to all message types (voice, fax, and email) from any device (phone, PC, pager or Web browser). Post Properties selected the AVST unified messaging solution for several reasons, including the fact that CallXpress is an open standards-based solution that could easily and cost effectively grow as their business grows. CallXpress has the ability to scale up to 128 ports, servicing up to 10,000 users on a single Windows server.

“As soon as we saw the ability of CallXpress to bring all our voice and fax messages together with our email in our Lotus Notes Inbox, we were sold, “ said Bonner. “CallXpress provided a feature rich and reliable unified messaging solution for Lotus Notes, which further extended our investment in Notes and Domino.”

Having access to all three messages at the desktop is critical to the Post Properties help desk team, who is constantly managing requests from customers. “When helping a customer over the telephone, many times our help desk staff members are placed on hold while the customer searches for information,” said Bonner. “With CallXpress, our staff members can continue to wait on hold while they listen to other voice messages over their computer speakers. So a call that arrives while the staff member is waiting on hold can still be addressed during this idle time.”

If one of those incoming calls is of a more urgent nature than the customer their holding with, staff members can ask to call back the customer he or she is working with and begin trouble shooting the more urgent issue at hand.

Another benefit CallXpress brings to the users at Post Properties is the ability to forward a voice message to somebody outside of their organization. No longer limited by the constraint of forwarding messages only to internal employees, users can simply forward the voice message to any Internet address. CallXpress simply creates a new Notes message with a wav file attachment of the original message. Now when help desk members need assistance from someone outside of their organization regarding a voice message they received or they want to reply to a customer’s voice message with an email response, they can do it in Notes.

THE RESULTS
Not only has CallXpress provided advanced functionality from a voice perspective, it has also enhanced Post Properties ability to handle fax messages. Before installing CallXpress, staff members at Post Properties had to print documents and walk to the printer to pick them up; walk to the fax machine where they had to stand in line and wait for their turn; and once it was their turn they had to manually feed the document into the fax machine and wait for a signal back that their fax had gone through. If the fax did not go through, that person had to start the whole time consuming process over again.

With CallXpress unified messaging, the entire fax process is done right from the desktop and there is no need for a user to leave their desktop to send or receive a fax. For example, once a person is done creating a document, they simply fax it right from the program they created the document in. In fact, it is estimated that the network fax portion of the AVST unified messaging suite alone saves each person up to 9 minutes for every fax they send out. In addition to the timesavings found sending documents, staff members no longer waste time searching their offices for faxes that were lost or misrouted since they are now delivered to a person’s Lotus Notes inbox.

Along with the gains in productivity and customer service, Post Properties employees are empowered with greater mobility thanks to the features of CallXpress, which allow them to access all of their messages over the telephone. So when employees are on the road they can call into the system and listen to their voice messages, listen to their Notes email using text-to-speech conversion, and manage any faxes they may have received. “Being able to listen to our Notes email over the telephone is a huge advantage for our traveling employees,” said Bonner. “They are able to check their messages without having to lug their laptops around searching for a connection to the Internet. Users have the ability to not only listen to email messages – but reply to them or forward email messages that need attention.”

However, if staff members do have access to their laptops before leaving on a trip, they can download all of their messages—voice, fax, and email—and work offline on the airplane. When they arrive at their hotel, they simply connect to the Internet and all of their reply messages are sent. “Our CallXpress system has definitely been a vital tool in allowing us to work more effectively and efficiently,” said Bonner.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Applied Voice & Speech Technologies, Inc. (“AVST”) is a leader in the unified communications (“UC”) marketplace uniquely combining the strengths of its world-class messaging platform, CallXpress®, with its speech-enabled call management module, Seneca™, to create a powerful, next-generation unified communications solution. The Company’s products are designed to scale and support organizations of all sizes. For more information please contact us at: www.avst.com or +1.949.699.2300.