Minneapolis’ landmark — the Guthrie Theater — evolved to VoIP communications to coincide with the opening of its beautiful new building on the banks of the Mississippi.

The Guthrie Theater began the planning process for an updated communications system two years ago. “Our phone system is the lifeblood of our organization,” said Information Systems Director Lou Ambrose. “The solution had to address the needs of our call centers.” The theater operates three call centers to solicit donations, market season tickets, and handle incoming ticket sales.

With the help of an outside consulting firm, the Guthrie Theater outlined their specifications and distributed a Request for Proposal (RFP) to Marco and several other vendors. In addition to competitive pricing, Lou and other staff members were impressed with their site visit to Marco. She commented, "It was really very inspiring to visit Marco. We felt both Marco and Mitel were overall more concerned about customer service issues." Marco also provides the theater with their copier/printer solutions.

Marco installed and implemented the Guthrie Theater’s Mitel 3300 system in May 2006. The system has allowed more than 300 Guthrie employees and 50–75 call center agents to evolve to IP communications technology. To ensure that incoming calls from their many subscribers and the general public are dealt with immediately and accurately, the theater installed the Mitel Customer Interaction and Mitel Messaging Solution. These solutions were vital to the theater’s future because subscription is at an all-time high of 32,000 and counting.

“The flexibility of the system is really valuable – especially because we decided to use some of our space differently than we had originally planned,” said Lou. “We can take our phones anywhere in the building and just plug them in.”

For administrative purposes, Marco implemented the Mitel Enterprise Manager solution. Enterprise Manager is an integrated suite of management tools that allows the Guthrie Theater to easily control and manage their system. It also gives them access to multiple sites and systems from a single interface lowering business costs and increasing staff productivity.

Marco also helped the theater implement an ACD (Automated Call Distribution) system using prairieFyre software which gives them the ability to track and measure employee productivity for outbound calls. Lou explained, “The prairieFyre software has a lot of advantages over what we had before. For the first time, we are looking at recording and monitoring our outbound calls so we can see how many calls are actually being placed.”

The Guthrie Theater felt the implementation process of their new system was seamless. “I have high praise for Lonnie,” said Lou, referring to Marco’s technical engineer Lonnie Six. “He’s someone you just know will get it done for you one way or another.” The theater was operating their new and old system at the same time to allow employees to move to their new building as time permitted. Lou explained, “Lonnie worked well with our phone provider to make the switchover. Marco really worked with us to schedule training sessions at various hours to fit our employees’ schedules.”

On their first day of service cutover, they had no calls for help – which in itself they felt was the result of a successfully implemented project. Lou stated, “We had our help line available for our employees but did not receive any calls for help or service.”

When asked if they would recommend Marco to other organizations, Lou replied, “Absolutely! They do what they say they’re going to do. Marco has an enthusiastic team and did a fabulous job.”