Thame, Oxon, UK: 26 February, 2013: Esselte, a $1 billion office products company and part of the Esselte Group, has appointed MeetingZone as its preferred conferencing provider.

MeetingZone was chosen because of its competitive pricing, its ability to deliver high quality global services which met Esselte's existing audio conferencing requirements, at the same time as providing a migration path to meet future conferencing and collaboration requirements.

"As a result of serious billing discrepancies and service issues we became increasingly disappointed and unhappy with both the pricing and level of service being delivered by our incumbent provider," said Mark Katz, CIO and Senior VP of Esselte.

"Audio conferencing is used ubiquitously across the Esselte Group and to change suppliers of ubiquitous services is always a hard decision to make as it can create a lot of work. Most CIOs and telecoms managers are reluctant to make such a change," added Katz. "However, the situation with our previous supplier meant that change was inevitable."

Katz looked very closely at the so called 'free' conferencing service providers but felt that their business models in general were not appropriate for Esselte. Katz also talked to several global conferencing providers who had previously approached him but found that their pricing and services were generally the same as the incumbent provider.

"Free is good, but never really 'free'! These free services are not necessarily right for large organisations where guaranteed conference calls at a given time with a given population, delivering consistency and predictability are a must," commented Katz.

"An important factor in the choice of MeetingZone was the persistence of one of its salesmen, who incidentally became Esselte's account manager. I had been talking to him over the course of several years but the timing had never been right for me to take negotiations forward," said Katz.

"The implementation of MeetingZone's service went extremely smoothly, in fact a whole lot smoother than the initial implementation with our previous supplier," continued Katz.

Esselte wanted to sign up its users for the conferencing service via its Intranet and not from its supplier's home page. This was difficult with the previous provider but proved to be simple and straightforward to implement with MeetingZone. The integration between Esselte's Intranet and MeetingZone's back office system was achieved in just two days.

MeetingZone's account manager worked closely with Esselte to ensure the timely delivery of fulfilment packs providing details of the features and functionality of MeetingZone's service. Where appropriate this collateral has been uploaded to the Esselte Intranet.

"I have been rather impressed with the flexibility of MeetingZone's back office capability which clearly allows it to get things done quickly," added Katz.

Audio conferencing is an integral part of how Esselte conducts its business across the group and across the globe, playing a key role in improving productivity and efficiency and reducing operating costs.

"Our account manager has worked with us to completely eliminate the historic technology problems we had encountered associated with latency and dropped conference calls. We are now receiving higher levels of service from a quality perspective. Competitive pricing has enabled us to control our conferencing costs. In short, MeetingZone's service has met Esselte's expectations. It does what we want it to do," concluded Katz.