Part One in a Series Highlighting Altura’s Responsiveness and Our Employee’s Dedication to Support Our Customers

By Bob Blazek, CEO & President, Altura Communication Solutions

Altura Communication Solutions has been working to assist our customers during the Covid-19 crisis. Now more than ever, communication services are needed, but the way organizations do business has drastically changed.

This unprecedented pandemic has forced businesses to quickly adapt to remote workforces and providers like us to provide solutions to make these transitions as quickly and seamlessly as possible.

The entire Altura team has been actively assisting our customers to address their needs, some directly, some in a supporting role. READ OUR RECENT NEWS RELEASE

As of today, we have responded to nearly 200 requests from customers to assist them with Covid-19 related assistance for remote workers, adjusted call center treatments, voice mail greetings, etc.  The requests have come from a broad spectrum of our customer base, with the majority coming from the healthcare, state/local government, financial services, and education verticals.

Terry Stephens, an Altura Field Engineer who has been working on the front line of the pandemic, recently helped a large regional medical center with the transition to at-home workers and assisted in setting up remote communications for their Covid-19 temporary testing facilities. Stephens explains, “At the start of the virus we didn’t know what to expect. The demands for service began to come in very quickly. We started by adding digital phones in locations that could be critical if the network went down to back up their current phone system. Phones were placed in the tent where virus testing was being conducted.” But there is still much work to be done. Stephens continues, “There is additional demand to add more trunks due to overwhelming call volume, so this is still in the process. Altura has added two spans of flex trunks which provided 46 ports since the Covid-19 outbreak began.”

Another field engineer, George Bonzani, has seen an extremely high number of requests for teleworker solutions. Bonzani has stepped up to help our customers understand the intricate details of these applications and deployment environments. He applied his knowledge and expertise to educate and train the organizations’ teleworker staff by demonstrating and assisting the employees with their understanding as to how these applications would integrate into their network. environment. “That,” Bonzani mentions, “can sometimes be a real challenge in itself.”

“It’s times like these when we often see others rising to the occasion. George happens to be one of those people doing just that,” commented Altura Project Manager Scott Mitchem.

Because of the complexity of some healthcare organizations, field engineers such as Mitch Arnold have spent many hours listening to the needs of these customers. As a result of Arnold’s dedication, he became a site-dedicated engineer for a large regional hospital in the Midwest when they requested a full-time Altura technical presence to assist with the various and ongoing tasks required to manage and support hospital staff in response to Covid-19.

Arnold’s dedicated work resulted in implementing a number of solutions including the following:

• Created a command center for the executive leadership to stay in contact with county and state officials.
• Set up a Covid-19 command testing center to provide results.
• Enabled hundreds of remote workers to use their cell phone via the Avaya One-X Workplace application. This allows workers to call patients from their cell phone but gives out their hospital desk phone number instead of their personal cell number.
• Created Covid-19 patient announcements to streamline appointments and testing procedures.
• Set up dedicated phone lines for ambulance workers to streamline Covid-19 patients.
• Re-routed multiple departmental phones numbers to improve responsiveness.
• Installed several soft phones (such as Avaya One-X Communicator and Equinox) on computer devices.

The support and dedication that Mitch Arnold exhibited was highly appreciated by hospital staff and management.

Many of our customers have been impacted by past events such as September 11, 2001 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and have implemented business continuity plans which made this transition easier.

For example, one of our clients, a large financial institution, made investments and preparations by implementing a business continuity plan. This prepared them for future crisis situations. Altura was able to assist this customer in transitioning 80% of their work force to remote home-based staff within a matter of days, including more than 800 of their Avaya Contact Center Agents.

Likewise, a recent Avaya upgrade with a major university customer made their transition seamless and easy, because the technology was already in place. The customer declared, “Without the well thought-out and timely investments in our new telecom system and associated infrastructure, this could not have taken place.”

In both examples, because the organizations were prepared, both saw little impact on business continuity when measures needed to be taken when affected by the Covid-19 crisis.

Altura continues to support our customers during the coronavirus pandemic. We will continue to highlight additional examples of the ways Altura and our committed staff are helping our customers support theirs.

I am very proud to part of an organization that has employees as committed and devoted to their community and customers as Altura. It is truly remarkable to see the work effort and dedication of Mitch Arnold, George Bonzani and Terry Stephens in assisting these customers in a time of need, and I would like to personally thank them for everything they are doing!

Part Two coming soon…