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When Kevin Hughes (News - Alert) opened his Allstate Agency in Gaithersburg, Md., over a year ago, he knew he didn’t want his old phone service.

Before striking out on his own, he had been sharing an office with another Allstate agent—and sharing the frustrations of a phone service that just didn’t meet his needs. On top of that, the service was expensive and unreliable.

“If there was an outage, you’d be on hold forever to resolve it. Three, four, five hours at a time,” Hughes recalls.

 An insurance agent can’t be on hold all day while customers are calling in, without the risk of losing business. Customer service is everything in the insurance business.

He also needed a phone service that delivers robust features - and robust cost savings.

He selected VoIP phone service provider Aptela.

Aptela (News - Alert) was especially well-suited for Hughes because Allstate’s corporate headquarters takes customer service seriously.

One of the requirements is that agents’ inbound phone calls roll over to the headquarters’ call center after business hours. At Hughes’ old office, the phone system that was in place made this requirement difficult to comply with, because an agent had to manually set the phone system to forward calls to the corporate headquarters.

Now, with Aptela’s automatic call forwarding, he no longer has to worry about calls not getting transferred. His calls are automatically forwarded at 5:30 pm ET and stop rolling over at 8 am.

Allstate monitors “call activity to make sure local agents are in compliance, so finding a phone solution that supported this requirement was a must,” Hughes said. “Aptela delivered.”

Hughes counts on Aptela to:

--Save money
--Keep the office open in any circumstances
--Maintain Allstate’s high standards for service
--Automatic call forwarding, which switches calls automatically to Allstate’s corporate after-hours call center
--Inbound Caller ID lets Hughes and his employee know who is calling before they answer, allowing them to decide how to manage the call
--Call Blast sends incoming calls to both Hughes’ and his employee’s extension—so they don’t miss calls
--Find Me/Follow Me lets Hughes receive calls wherever he is – on his home or mobile phone
--Call History keeps a log of all inbound and outbound calls, making it easy to look up phone numbers and return calls

With Aptela, Hughes no longer has to worry about missing calls from customers or prospects. Even after hours, incoming calls get automatically forwarded to the corporate call center for servicing. And while Hughes works out of his office most days, he appreciates the flexibility built into Aptela’s VoIP solution.

For instance, when the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area was hit with unusual, back-to-back blizzards in 2010, Hughes simply set his Aptela system to forward calls to his home.

With Aptela’s Mobile Extension, Hughes was able to receive inbound calls, voicemails and faxes to his company’s main number via his mobile phone while he was working at home. This allowed every call he made to appear as though it was coming from his office.

Best of all, Aptela gives Hughes a flexible and full-featured phone system with unlimited calling for less than half the price he was paying Verizon (News - Alert).

“With Aptela, we rarely miss a call,” Hughes said.

To learn more, download this free case study.