Company Profile
Founded in 1952, The Leavitt Group is one of the largest insurance brokerages in the US. Each affiliated agency is a separate entity, typically owned by its’ on-site manager and by Leavitt Group Enterprises, Inc. The company's approximate 1,500 employees operate out of 115 offices located in the US, and these numbers continue to grow. Annualized premiums are nearly $1.2 billion. The Leavitt Group is headquartered in Cedar City, Utah.
The Challenge
The typical Leavitt Group brokerage office has 10-15 staff members, although some go as high as 70. In addition, there are roughly 100 people at headquarters. Keeping a fax machine or a fax server running produces an unnecessary drain on both financial and IT resources. The manual processes involved in faxing also create a significant productivity burden.
Both issues were showing up on Randy Wilson’s radar, an IT consultant in The Leavitt Group's service division.
"One of the things we pride ourselves on in the service division is to look for ways to improve productivity and reduce costs," Wilson says.
"If the bottom line is lower, we all win. After running some analysis, it became pretty obvious that the solutions we were using - fax machines and fax servers - were not ideal."
A major challenge with both fax machines and servers was archiving. The busiest office of the 115 sites handles up to 20,000 faxed pages per month. Although it would seem the electronic format used by fax servers would make documents easier to organize, there were still problems, including old faxes getting lost and no way to attach electronic confirmations to files.
As the problems continued to grow, Wilson and others in the IT department began investigating alternatives that would increase productivity while reducing costs. They also wanted a solution that would integrate easily with the agency management software and would be highly reliable in order to relieve their own support burden.
The Solution
With the new challenges The Leavitt Group was facing, he decided to look into hosted fax services.
"It was very important for me to find the right vendor, who was mature in this playing field and capable of delivering reliable service and support," Wilson says.
"MyFax has not only delivered with excellent service and support, but they gave us some aggressive pricing as well. I’m convinced we got the best value for our money by going with MyFax."
Another factor of great importance was customer service. Wilson wanted to be sure any problems that might come up would be handled quickly.
"I saw a review on TopTenREVIEWS™ and MyFax is listed as #1 in customer support," Wilson says.
"My personal experience lines up directly with that. MyFax customer service has been outstanding." Another advantage of MyFax over competitive services is no software is required. From an IT perspective, that means one less potential hole in the security infrastructure and one less application to provision and manage.
Currently The Leavitt Group is targeting MyFax to be deployed on 750 desktops. But Wilson thinks this number will be even higher.
"The more we use it, the more our people are going to want it," he says.
The Results
Most of the results so far have been in soft costs, such as productivity. Here the savings have been significant.
"There is less need for a gatekeeper since most faxes are sent directly to and from the individual user's desktop," Wilson states.
"This eliminates the need for someone to sort through faxes and deliver them to the appropriate person. Our agents really like that - especially because they can even send and receive faxes when they're calling on a customer or otherwise out of the office."
One hard cost decrease is the cost of a phone line. The average cost for a phone line in a remote office is $40 per month plus long distance charges. Now there is no additional cost for long distance. Paper and toner costs have also been reduced.
"Overall, MyFax has been a huge success for us," Wilson says.
"You can tell by its’ rapid adoption. MyFax makes great sense for the majority of our locations. It's just too good to ignore."
| "MyFax has not only delivered with excellent service and support, but they have really given us some aggressive pricing as well." |
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Randy Wilson
IT consultant, The Leavitt Group
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