Anyone who says talk is cheap might have a hard time convincing Chuck Giger, service manager for Fazio Mechanical Services.
Fazio racked up enormous bills on telephone calling cards and an 800 number used by service technicians to communicate with the office. And despite the high bills, Fazio’s technicians still had no way to communicate amongst themselves for advice about a problem requiring a creative trouble-shooting team effort.
Enter NEXTEL Direct Communication Systems. Through a Nextel-based phone system, the company’s 30 service representatives now walk around with cell phones with Nextel’s two-way radio feature.
For an initial investment of $1,500, Giger estimates that Fazio saves between $1,500 and $2,000 a month in telephone charges.
In addition to the quantifiable savings, Giger points out the intangible time savings for the servicemen. They no longer have to walk down a flight of stairs to get to a store’s pay phone, and people working on different floors of the same building can communicate instantly.
The cell phones also have a locking mechanism which prevents the use of the phones for personal calls. The one caveat: The system does have a failing endemic to all cell phone systems: dead spots, especially near power lines.
Despite that, Giger says, “I don’t know how we got by without them before.”
Patrick Rodgers