Customer Story: Walman Optical

In 1915, Walman Optical was founded in Minneapolis by J.A.L. Walman. An optometrist, optician and jeweler, Mr. Walman had extremely high standards with a concern for quality and detail. Attention to these standards became the foundation for the success and growth of the company. It was a continuing quest for quality that led Walman Optical to improve their company-wide cohesiveness and caller experiences by replacing their voice and data networks.

The X-Cel Contact Lens Division of Walman Optical has customer service representatives in seven locations across the country. The goal was to effectively utilize all the employees by cost effectively creating a national Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) Group. They also wanted to deploy a more converged and cost effective data solution among all their locations. Dan Torgersen, Walman Optical’s Vice President, MIS and Special Projects said, “A standard PSTN plus Frame Relay services could not cost effectively fulfill these business needs, so VoIP and voice/data convergence would need to be investigated.”

Encompass Unified Communications was chosen for its cost effective voice/data convergence solution and for its hosted, inbound contact center platform with its robust ACD reporting. The seven offices were not only linked via four-digit dialing—that required no long distance calling between locations—the inbound contact center solution was also installed to distribute calls across all locations.

Each X-Cel Contact location has contact lens consultants (CLC) and customer service representatives. There are only a couple of CLCs in each location. These are highly skilled professionals that speak to Optometrists about contact lens recommendations. When all CLCs at a particular location are busy, Encompass’ hosted contact center solution allows the Optometrist to choose to either continue waiting for the CLC at their location or be connected to the next available CLC elsewhere in the seven office system. This proved to be a huge benefit for Walman Optical because it made better use of the Optometrist’s time and it more efficiently utilized CLC expertise across all locations.

The Encompass hosted contact center solution also improved the efficiency of operations while saving Walman Optical a great deal on their communication expenses. According to Torgersen, “We got more for less. Encompass Unified Communications provided Walman Optical with significantly greater bandwidth, voice service, long distance service, data connectivity and a hosted contact center solution for less than we previously paid for just Frame Relay data connectivity alone.” In addition to the hard savings, Walman Optical reported soft cost reductions by having a single point of contact for support whether it was needed with hardware, T1 circuits or outbound long distance.

Alternative PSTN solutions and other hosted VOIP solutions with similar functionality investigated by Walman Optical were found to be unaffordably expensive, but not so with the Encompass hosted VoIP solution. Torgersen advises, “Any organization with multiple locations can benefit greatly from an Encompass integrated voice and data solution to increase productivity, improve efficiency and reduce costs."

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