Solutions

Footprints Recruiting

Footprints Recruiting is in the business of finding and placing foreign language teachers with schools across Asia and South America. Owned and operated by former ESL teachers, this 15-person company has offices in three different countries. As the largest supplier of teachers to the Korean Ministry of Education, Footprints has leveraged its professional expertise with state-of-the-art communications to propel their business to the top of its class.

From the time they incorporated in 2001, Footprints enjoyed a long period of sustained growth -- one that necessitated an upgrade of their 6/16 Nortel phone system. The limited voice features and lack of integration with their computer network meant that staff was compensating for gaps left by outdated technology. Footprints CEO and co-founder Jeff Strachan explained “We were wasting valuable time directing inbound calls to the right person and taking messages. On top of that, we had offices in Vancouver, Australia and Korea along with plans to open new ones in Thailand, the US and the UK, and therefore had a burning need to integrate our international offices.” At the outset, Footprints estimated that each staff member was losing 108.3 hours per year with the old phone and IT set-up. “Look at the math,” said Strachan, “That many hours, with fifteen staff and growing…. what does that cost a business?”

The management team surveyed options that would reduce their inter-office communication costs without compromising on Footprint’s ‘high-touch’ approach to overseas recruiting and placement. They also wanted to reduce the overall costs of ownership. They needed a system that would provide such features as remote management ability, voicemail for all staff, integrated Softphones for travel and international offices, support for VoIP, and user-friendly management options that enabled them to make changes independent of tech support.

It wasn’t until after they purchased an Enterprise Edge phone system that they learned about the SUTUS Business Central 200 solution. “After looking into the benefits of the SUTUS technology, it was clear that the Business Central offered a greater degree of flexibility in how we could set up and run our phone and IT infrastructure” Strachan explained. “We actually ended up selling the Enterprise Edge system at a loss after purchasing the SUTUS product as the savings we gain through reducing the ongoing cost of ‘moves, adds and changes’ quickly added up to more than the loss.”

Designed to fit businesses of three to twenty-five staff, the SUTUS Business Central is a single device that runs all essential phone, data and networking services. It gave Footprints the enterprise-grade phone system they were looking for, with a wider array of advanced data and networking functions that included file server, email server, router, firewall, wireless access point, VPN remote access server, automated backups, and the ability to simultaneously support both standard phone line and VoIP connections.

“What we really liked about the Business Central solution is that it seemed perfectly designed for us – it met and exceeded all the strategic needs we had identified including allowing us to maintain it locally; we like that ability and the reassurance it gives. We like to know that we can operate independently when we need to, and that we can manage many of our systems without having to get someone in at $90 to $150 per hour to do a 10-minute job.”

With the Business Central, Footprints management noticed an immediate and dramatic improvement in call handling, and a reduction in the amount of time spent transferring calls. The company also started using the single inbox ‘voicemail-to-email’ feature to collect voice samples of prospective teachers that could then be emailed to overseas clients. “For many of our international clients, the ability to hear a prospective employee’s voice as part of the hiring process is a big deal,” Strachan explained. Other gains included the integration with Polycom phones, a comprehensive shared file server, built in wireless access point, automated attendant, phone extensions and voicemail for all staff and the ability to incorporate softphones for travel and outside offices.

“Each of our offices is connected by the BC200 by phone extension. If my staff in Vancouver need to talk to me they just enter 6001 on their phone and it rings me in Australia, or Hong Kong, or Vietnam or wherever I am with my computer. I have access to my voicemail and my phone literally wherever I can get an internet connection. It’s given us the ability to control the technology ourselves.”