BACKGROUND
With its entrance into professional football in 1946, the San Francisco 49ers National Football League (NFL) team has the distinction of being the first major league professional sports franchise on the West Coast.

Since then, the team has earned numerous achievements, including five Super Bowl championships, five National Football Conference (NFC) championships and 17 NFC West championships. Most recently, the 49ers attained the title of the NFC West champions for the 2002 season.

The 49ers (www.49ers.com) earned its name from the surge of gold miners to the San Francisco area during 1849. With offices in Santa Clara, Calif., and home turf at the 3Com Park—a San Francisco stadium seating 69,734—the entire 49er organization of 173 employees is made up of players and coaches as well as marketing, public relations and other administrative personnel.

THE CHALLENGE
“Our fans are what make the 49ers,” said Alexander Ignacio, Director of Information Systems for the professional football team.

This appreciation drives the organization’s commitment to effective, two-way communication with its supporters, including fans, corporate partners, reporters and others. As the director in charge of managing technology solutions, Ignacio sees the challenges involved with maintaining timely correspondence with numerous contacts.

“Every day our staff members receive hundreds of messages via fax, email and voicemail,” Ignacio explained. Among other subjects, the messages range from fan feedback or sponsorship responses to press requests for interviews. However, regardless of subject, staff members work to respond quickly and effectively.

Frequently, messages are voicemails that carry meaningful information within the call details or voice inflection. Since staff members must often work as a team to form a response, handling these voicemails proved a time-consuming task. To maintain message clarity when sending information to other contacts, the staff would often re-type the message or actually record it for backup.

Extra efforts related to voicemails—as well as emails and faxes—became especially challenging when employees were traveling with the football team. And since the 49ers’ pre- and regular season consists of 10 home games and 10 away games, being “on the road” is a common occurrence.

To check emails while mobile, staff members needed a reliable phone line for laptop connection—not always easy-to-find in airports, buses, various hotels, etc. Additionally, for urgent faxes, they would often end up calling the main office to route the document to their hotel or to have office personnel read the fax over the phone. All of these tasks increased telephony and faxing costs in both time and money.

“We needed a streamlined system to access and share information,” Ignacio said. “Such a solution would enable us to maintain the high standards of responsive and clear communication for and with our supporters.”

The organization tried voicemail and unified messaging from a known provider. “However,” Ignacio recounted, “the solution did not meet our requirements and a review of its product was negative—too many lost messages and insufficient support from the vendor.”

To become a “valuable player” in the 49ers team, an effective product would need to be technologically advanced, compatible with existing systems, easy-to-use (for users and administrators) and reliable.

THE SOLUTION
Upon viewing AVST CallXpress®, the leading independent unified messaging solution, Ignacio was convinced it could tackle their communication challenges.

AVST, maker of market-leading business information delivery solutions, excels in creating products that keep business within reach. CallXpress Unified Messaging provides access to all messages—voice, fax and email—in one Inbox, and makes them accessible from the telephone, mobile phone, personal digital assistant (PDA), computer or Internet.

“AVST CallXpress is a proven hit within the 49ers organization,” Ignacio said. “Co-workers often tell me they don’t know how they lived without it.” Thus far, executive officers as well as public relations, marketing and IT personnel use CallXpress to manage messages. More employees will soon be added.

Among the useful features, users can now listen to and forward voicemails through email (as .WAV attachments), relaying the exact messages to co-workers as opposed to explaining or recording them. “Nothing is distorted or lost in translation,” Ignacio related.

“That is helpful in various cases, such as quotes for reporters or sponsors.” Also, since voicemails appear in the Microsoft Outlook® inbox denoted by a phone icon, the messages are easier to categorize and manage.

Other CallXpress capabilities enable the staff to increase communication efficiency, even while on the road. More than half of the current users travel at least several days a month and all of the users often employ unified messaging features during off-business hours, such as during the commute to and from work or on weekends. In these situations, CallXpress enables employees to access voice, fax and email messages from a single source, rather than chasing several systems to manage them. In the case of the 49ers staff, accessing all the message types via phone proves to be a huge time-saver.

“CallXpress Unified Messaging gives our staff an alternative way to access their voice, fax and email messages without the use of a computer,” Ignacio said. “This is extremely beneficial when a data connection is not available or a laptop is acting up.”

According to Ignacio, training users on the unified messaging system has been straightforward and enjoyable.

He laughed, “It’s fun to hear comments from users new to unified messaging, such as: ‘It blows my mind to hear my email over the phone,’ or ‘I just listened to that voicemail through my email Inbox—that is so weird!’“ Ignacio attributes the success of these and other features to the “incredible” text-to-speech and voice file storage technology within the CallXpress product.

RESULTS
As a system administrator, Ignacio appreciates CallXpress benefits that make his job easier. “The need for technical support and time for training has been reduced thanks to the intuitive user interface and compatibility with programs already familiar to users.” Also, Ignacio said, “The open architecture of CallXpress lends to reliability and lower costs for companies migrating to the solution from other systems.”

And he feels the streamlined integration makes management easier and less prone to error.

Some CallXpress features have led to results Ignacio did not predict. For instance, the ability to easily forward voicemail and fax messages via email increases security for the personnel.

Still, best of all the benefits of using the unified messaging system is the improved communication between the 49ers staff and team supporters. “Using CallXpress increases the ease and speed with which we can respond to messages,” Ignacio said. “We are better able to maintain sponsorships, respond to urgent press inquiries and give back to our fans.”

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.

ABOUT ATI
ATI (American Telesource Inc.), www.ati-cti.com, was formed in 1987 to help companies communicate more effectively. ATI implements CTI and IP telephony within corporate infrastructures throughout the United States. This includes Voice over IP (VoIP), unified messaging, self-service e-commerce and wireless applications. ATI is a value added reseller for AVST, NEC, Edify, Cisco and Shoreline Communications. As the San Francisco 49ers provider of unified messaging and VoIP solutions, ATI helps the 49ers beat the competition. For more information call 1.888.4747-ATI.