How Madison Pet Hospital Overcame a Phone System Outage with Sangoma Switchvox

The Customer

Madison Pet Hospital is a leading veterinary clinic in Madison County, Alabama. The clinic is dedicated to offering a range of advanced services focused on prevention and the overall well-being of dogs and cats, as well as guinea pigs, rabbits, and other small animals.

Business Challenges

When building a state-of-the-art facility to house their veterinary practice, Madison Pet Hospital turned to GigaParts, a local IT and telecommunications services reseller. According to Ruth Freeman, the clinic’s office manager, Madison Pet Hospital had initially been impressed by a Pulsar360 phone system when it occupied a temporary office space. Once they moved into the new building, the system’s problems began to emerge. “It gave us nothing but problems,” says Freeman. “We had extreme connection problems and the call quality was horrible. Customers couldn’t hear us. Calls dropped, and customers complained that on their end, the phone rang continuously without anyone picking up. Unfortunately, it didn’t always ring in the building.” Additionally, when a call ended on the Pulsar360 system, it did not disconnect. Instead, it sent a phantom call to the next extension, cycling the call from phone to phone throughout the building with no way to answer or disconnect. “When you picked up, there was nobody there…” Freeman recalls. “It was frustrating! ” Ed Clifford, GigaParts’ director of sales and marketing, says the problem was not with their infrastructure, noting that they had built a state-of-the-art network with security, a guest network, and all the latest switches and cabling. “We came in over a weekend, programmed all the phones, transferred the numbers, and had them ready to go live Monday morning,” reports Clifford. “For a business as customer-service-oriented as Madison Pet Hospital, Pulsar360 simply could not work at that location.” The veterinary clinic’s new location, only two miles from the temporary site, was known to be frequently affected by ISP outages, but that was no excuse for Freeman and her team. “I spoke with Pulsar360 management several times, and they put GigaParts through the wringer, saying it was latency or something else. GigaParts was there for two consecutive days, without charging us a cent, trying to resolve the problem, but before they had the system running with duct tape and a piece of string, Pulsar360 couldn’t solve the mystery,” Freeman explains. “It was a phone system that simply didn’t know it was a phone system.”

Solutions From Sangoma

This prompted GigaParts representative Chris Brewer, who was dissatisfied with Pulsar360 even before the problems at Pet Hospital, to decide that Switchvox was the best VoIP solution for businesses. In fact, Brewer had just completed training and certification on the Switchvox platform. It was the perfect opportunity to see Switchvox in action. GigaParts deployed an on-premises Switchvox installation, with a dedicated Switchvox PBX appliance and Sangoma D‑Series IP phones. Built on a unified communications platform as powerful as an enterprise system, Switchvox is managed through an intuitive graphical interface that enabled GigaParts to configure multiple users and set up the system quickly. “They brought in the IP phones and configured them so I could test them for a few days,” says Freeman. “The first call I made was to my daughter, who said the difference in call quality was like night and day.”

The Results

Madison Pet Hospital could not be more satisfied with its new Switchvox phone system. One feature they particularly appreciate is the ability to receive incoming faxes as emails instead of having their fax machine print hundreds of pages required for veterinary records. “With Switchvox, a fax arrives as a digital file, and I can go directly to the information I need and ignore the rest. It also eliminates having to come in the next morning to find all the paper that arrived overnight on the fax machine,” Freeman explains. “I also like the mobility feature and the fact that if I’m out of town or we’re closed for a holiday or weekend, all I have to do is press the ‘notifications’ button and Switchvox sends me notifications, and I can access the system and check my voicemail and emails,” Freeman reports. “If I can’t wait for regular business hours, I can call people back from my mobile phone,” she continues. “When we’re closed, the system also redirects emergency calls to our 24-hour veterinary referral hospital in Decatur.” Ultimately, Switchvox solved the challenges they faced with the phone system at their new location. Instead, Switchvox continues to provide Madison Pet Hospital with the advanced features they needed to improve their business communications and ensure the high level of customer service they want to provide to their patients and clients.