MedQuist Selects Unified Communications from AVST

FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. - New Jersey-based MedQuist selected CallXpress from Applied Voice & Speech Technologies (AVST) to provide remote access to e-mail, voice mail, and faxes in one box to over 1,000 virtual teleworkers.

MedQuist adopted a plan in October 2005 to centralize and streamline the company's organizational and operational structure to better serve its customers. This move was supported by several actions, including the elimination of local service centers following a shift of resources to a single national service delivery and support organization for all of the company's services and products. As a result, approximately 1,000 MedQuist employees were transitioned from an office environment to a home-based workplace. The challenge was to adopt technologies that would keep remote knowledge workers productive and accessible at all times.

"We wanted to find a unified communications solution that could leverage our existing infrastructure. CallXpress was the perfect fit, offering an easy integration path for both our TDM switch and our new Mitel 3300 IP switch," said Lauren Johansson, MedQuist's manager of IP Telephony Services. "In addition, we needed a centralized solution that worked in a complex environment. A basic requirement was for employees to have the ability to answer voice mail through the 'corporate platform.' This meant that they could access messages from any facility without dialing into another switch."

MedQuist leveraged relationships with its partners, including VoIP Networks and AVST, to expand its existing communications platform to support its growing business and new initiative for a virtualized workforce. Today, MedQuist has a centralized call center, three TDM switches, eight VoIP switches, and two CallXpress systems to support nearly 1,500 mailboxes and over 500 VoIP users. MedQuist expects to have at least 2,000 e-mail boxes by the end of 2007.

"We have relied on great partnerships with technology vendors that we've worked with for years and have challenged them to innovate not only in the areas of technology, but also customer service and responsiveness," said Carolyn Caton, MedQuist's vice president of Telecommunications. "AVST has proven to be an ideal partner. We are looking to the future and how our communications infrastructure will evolve, and we look forward to working with AVST to meet our new goals for 2007 and beyond."

MedQuist also utilizes CallXpress for its call center. Today, CallXpress handles all traffic into the MedQuist call center with an average of 4,000 calls per day come into the call center - prompt change and routing are done via CallXpress.

"We have asked a lot of CallXpress and have been very pleased with the performance of the product," added Johansson. "In addition, CallXpress is a snap to administer. It takes us minutes to make a programming change, where other systems we've seen take up to an hour."

CallXpress is a unified communications solution that delivers call processing, voice messaging, unified messaging, and speech applications.