Heartland Co-op

Heartland Co-op chooses LightEdge Hosted PBX VoIP

Overview
Since the 1900's, Central Iowa farmers knew they needed a place to market their grain for a fair price. Now over 100 years later, Heartland Co-op has evolved into one of the countries largest agricultural cooperatives with over 30 locations. Heartland began a partnership with LightEdge in May 2001. Initially, Heartland utilized Business Internet services, but later expanded to traditional Wide Area Network (WAN), URL Filtering, Managed Firewall and Spam Filtering.

The Challenge
Always choosing growth over stagnation, in 2004, Heartland was at a crossroads regarding their phone system. The large number of regional locations made their phone system complicated and costly. Each location required an expensive PBX box. Long distance charges applied to inter-office calls. Each office require multiple lines. Direct dialing between locations was not available. In-bound calls were often unanswered or routed to a message system due to staffing limitations.

The LightEdge Solution
Because LightEdge was a trusted business partner, Heartland agreed to evaluate Voice-over-IP (VoIP) solutions as an alternative to installing a new traditional PBX system. After careful consideration, Heartland Co-op realized that Hosted PBX VoIP could provide a better and more flexible inter-office voice integration at a substantial cost savings compared to traditional PBX.

The LightEdge AVS Hosted PBX offered Heartland many advantages over their previous system. Not only was it not necessary to upgrade their expensive PBX, but Heartland was able to drastically reduce the number of telephone lines needed for the headquarters and remotes since their voice services were now being carried via a high-speed connection through LightEdge. Heartland also reduced long-distance costs as their remote sites were able to direct-dial other locations through the Hosted VoIP network.

The advanced, web-based features and functionality of VoIP, also answered to their messaging needs. Within no time, staff began to apply call forwarding and message routing to ensure that all calls were answered promptly.