Transcript
Antoinetta Carboni:
Thank you for joining our session today. I am Antoinetta Carboni, National Account Manager at ETHERFAX, and with me today I have Joe Rutledge, who is a business continuity manager at a large healthcare facility. Thank you, Joe for joining.
Joe Rutledge:
Yeah, you bet.
Antoinetta Carboni:
Good. How are you today?
Joe Rutledge:
I’m great. How are you?
Antoinetta Carboni:
Good. I’m doing very well, thank you. I’m really excited about today’s session. I think it’s important nowadays to talk about solution selling, providing solutions to organizations like yours. Talk a little bit about the history of how we work together in the past and really the synergies between organizations when you are providing solutions. Just to give you a little background, I’m with ETHERFAX today. I’ve been in the fax, secure file transfer industry for 20 plus years, providing solutions for healthcare organizations, banking, insurance, manufacturing, legal, you name it. It’s really industry neutral and today we just wanted to really talk about what it takes when we are providing solutions like this and really matching up what the needs of an organization like where Joe is at today, and how we come in as a solution provider and really understand the needs of the organization, not only today, but the roadmap, understanding what the direction is of the organization and how we can map that, not just today’s needs, but how we can grow with them in the future as well.
Joe, do you want to talk a little bit about your experience? We’ve worked together for over five years. We worked together at my previous organization and you were at a previous company as well. That organization was Biscom Incorporated, selling similar solutions. The reason for my move over to ETHERFAX was we did see many organizations like Joe’s moving to the cloud completely. So secure file transfer solutions, fax solutions, everything was moving to the cloud. Organizations were trying to diminish the footprint of any type of in-house fax server technology, and they were looking for a true enterprise cloud solution that met all the security specifications, certifications was fast, was cheaper, was thorough, and had an intensive roadmap as far as technology. So Joel, I’ll have you talk a little bit before I keep going on because I get really excited about these type of
Joe Rutledge:
Topics. Yeah, well first of all, I want to say that I get cold calls from vendors all the time, cold calls, emails, and they’re always looking for new business opportunities. But most of the time I get introduced to somebody and then they hand me off to somebody else internally within the company. So that person that makes the cold call and the introduction, they’re just the hook person. So it feels a little bit sterile and a little bit produced when that happens. So most of the time I try to stick with partners that I know I’ve worked with in the past. I know they’ve got my best interest out. So the thing that impressed me about you honestly, is your ability to listen to all of our requirements and work with your internal team to make sure that you could define a solution for us. So that’s really important. It feels more like a partnership than it does just a transaction. So the other thing about my job too is I’m always interested in availability. Those kind of things are key in today’s world, especially with things being in the cloud and just the security aspects of things too. So in your case with your company that you’re at now, you’ve got all these certifications for security, which makes our job easier. So yeah, I think that’s one of the main drivers for us.
Antoinetta Carboni:
Well, thank you for that. I know I pride myself and with the organizations I was previously and where I’m at today with either facts, the main thing for me is really the culture of the organization. We’re very customer focused. When we are providing solutions, we’re looking at this, as you said, as a partnership. And more than that, when I meet people like yourself and all the clients that also become somewhat of friends because working so closely together, I have responsibility not only to the organization you’re at, but also to you. They’re giving you this project. So my main goal is to make it successful for you and for the company.
They’re very intense mission-critical applications that we’re working with. I know a lot of people say Antoinette Fax, it’s still a big thing. It’s huge and it’s only getting bigger and we are moving more into that secure file exchange and we can see the roadmap moving in that direction. But as it is today, facts is still mission critical. We take it very seriously. So like you said, it’s a partnership. There has to be synergy, but there has to be a match in technologies, meaning we’re providing a solution that matches all your needs and then it also grows with you in the future. I think it’s very important to listen to customers like you. We do have a customer focus group that we like to invite our customers to help us build our roadmap for the future, but it is people like you that help us understand what comes next. We do that together, but we love the input. So you’ve always been great like that. I think you’re very straightforward and I appreciate that there’s no reading between the lines, this is what you need, this is what you want to have meant, and service has always been huge to you. Customer service has always been a big thing and we pride ourselves with that as well. So our customers come first. We know it’s mission critical. We want to get the job done for you guys.
Joe Rutledge:
Yeah, I think transparency has definitely something that I wear very visibly.
Antoinetta Carboni:
Yes, you do, Joe, but it’s appreciated. It’s very much appreciated. It just makes our jobs easier to know where each of us stand and what the expectations are. I think expectations extremely important. There’s deadlines, there’s start date, there’s go live dates. We need to be there to meet all of those for you, and that’s our commitment.
Joe Rutledge:
I totally agree. Partnership is very important.
Antoinetta Carboni:
Yeah, I know that I have a passion for it. I think I have a passion for really providing solutions that work for organizations, give them a competitive edge in the marketplace. But my biggest thing is when you’re making an investment like this, I not only look at what’s happening today, I like to look at what’s happening three to five years down the line and make sure that we are also in sync down the road as well. Because all of us want to have continued success and happy customers because you are the type of people that make our industry and our organization grow. It’s word of mouth, it’s people sharing information, experiences because always no matter what, if it’s in business or personal, everyone remembers how you made them feel. And that was one big thing in the management team at ETHERFAX. It’s all about the customer always.
It’s really driven on how we get those customers to the most, the highest success rate and really deliver the best ROI. Yeah. So Joe, I could go on a lot more. You can understand, I love talking about this, but I just wanted to spend a few minutes talk about the experience of what it is and how these projects are successful, not just from a technology standpoint, but from also building a relationship. I know you trust myself and my technical team. You always have, and we’ve delivered as have you and your team, but I just wanted to share what the experience is from a customer and vendor perspective.
Joe Rutledge:
Well, you talked about facts being just facts, but it is a mission critical service that the teams need to provide to our internal customers and stakeholders. In this particular case, the reason why we reached out to get their facts is because the current provider that we had was not living up to their service level agreement, so they were falling down and at the end of that was we’d be impacted from it, right? Absolutely. So we had to find a solution to that. So implementing your solution allowed us to decommission that old provider and possibly the second one that we had as well, which was a backup to the other one. Absolutely. Yeah. So I think at the end, we’re saving money and getting higher reliability.
Antoinetta Carboni:
Absolutely. I’m glad you mentioned the SLAs. That comes up all the time for a lot of their checks box items, but they’re mission critical applications. So for instance, we don’t get that fax through or we don’t receive that fax. It could be something from an insurance organization that’s looking for confirmation, something was received to move forward with a procedure. For example, if we don’t get that fax and return it in a timely manner, that patient could lose out on that surgical procedure not getting approved, things of that nature. I’m giving you an example, but everything is in a timely manner. The execution has to be precise and the SLAs have to be there in order to deliver as well as a security. I think the biggest thing with ETHERFAX, with me coming from 23 years and another organization was the security aspect and the data center infrastructure really the way it’s built out nationwide, worldwide, and having that DR capability from every aspect from the infrastructure side as well. So security infrastructure, technology roadmap, customer service, SLAs, functionality, all important, very, very important when it comes to these type of projects.
Joe Rutledge:
Yeah, the previous place that I worked was very traditional data center focused, and now with where I’m at now, everything is in the cloud, so it’s very important to make sure that interoperability within that cloud infrastructure all occurs and that’s where you guys shined.
Antoinetta Carboni:
Absolutely, and I think one of the big things too when you came to us is because we are agnostic, so we can come in and really plug into the back end of any other solution you have on that front end. I don’t need to name the other solutions, but there are multiple that we come in and can be the back end. So everything stays the same on the front end, and either us comes in on the backend or we come in and we can replace the complete solution, which we have done in your organization, but there’s a lot of power behind that. Where we see phased approaches is in larger organizations coming in multiple solutions, we don’t want to have any type of downtime. It is mission critical. So we come in, we take a phased approach, we do statement of works, but we really take a customer through a phased approach. So no impact to the user or the applications, which to me is huge. The more you talk to people in different industries, that’s the big thing. They can’t have anything impact their business. Any five minute delay, a day delay has an impact and sometimes a very big impact, financial or customer service driven. So we take that extremely seriously here at ETHERFAX. Yeah. So anything else you want to add to that? I don’t want to keep
Joe Rutledge:
No, I think I’m good and it’s been great working with you.
Antoinetta Carboni:
Thank you. You’re the same half the battle is having two teams work together and delivering the information and having the team work together. So we’ve been very fortunate with yourself and many of our other customers, which there’s thousands, but it takes a team in order to make these projects successful. So we want to say thank you for choosing. You bet. It’s a pleasure. And we feel lucky.
Joe Rutledge:
We’re lucky to have you guys too. Yeah, it’s a good partnership.
Antoinetta Carboni:
Oh, great. Joe, thank you so much. I really bet appreciate this time and I hope everyone enjoyed the impromptu conversation. We’re excited to share further details. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us and we’ll be doing more of these as well. So thank you so much, Joe. You’re welcome. And everyone have a great day.
Joe Rutledge:
You too. Thanks.
Antoinetta Carboni:
Thank you.