Edco Awards & Specialties

Edco Awards & Specialties (www.edco.com) is a premier supplier of Corporate Recognition Products, Branded Merchandise and Athletic Awards on the Internet. Family owned and operated for three generations in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.  EDCO was incorporated in 1969. Originally known as Trophies by EDCO, Inc. and still incorporated as such, the name was changed (dba) in 2000 to EDCO Awards & Specialties to reflect its ever growing presence in the ad specialty / promotional product and wearables market.

In the summer of 2010, Rick Cordary, Edco’s President, was looking for a phone system that could link their four locations into a single unified system.  Edco has always been customer service oriented and having calls ring to all four locations would mean a customer’s call would always be answered right away.  Edco had been using FacetTerm and FacetWin since the late ’90s, so they were familiar with FacetCorp’s support.  Rick had heard about FacetPhone and decided it would give him the phone system features he was looking for.  The system was installed in August 2010 and then the fun started!

Once Rick saw how programmable the FacetPhone system was, he started thinking!  They had an old time clock that would ring a bell signaling the times for opening, breaks, lunch and close.  The time clock broke and it occurred to Rick that FacetPhone could probably play a bell over the paging system.  We easily setup some scheduled events and a script to play a wav file over the paging system.  Now all the significant times of the business day are rung in with the sound of Big Ben chiming over the paging system.

On to the next idea!  Edco’s sales people must go to the shipping or production departments to inspect product before it is shipped.  Sometimes they were slow to get up and do this.  Rick decided to have a program written that would run in shipping and production.  When an order is ready for inspection, the program can be used to drag the salesperson’s name to a box.  Then the program notifies FacetPhone and the sales person’s phone starts announcing a message like “Come to shipping to approve order”.  Once they have approved or rejected the order, the salesperson can use the program to stop the announcement on their phone.

As Edco’s Internet sales increased, they noticed that sometimes shopping cart transactions might go unnoticed for some time.  Working with Edco we were able to setup interaction such that when a web order is placed, all the extensions on the FacetPhone system will play the message “New web sale”, prompting the sales staff to check their email for the incoming order.

We know that Rick will come up with some more interesting ideas.  In his own words:

As I type this I am thinking of other novel uses for our Facetphone system, and when I come up with one, I am sure the Facet staff will help us to implement it.   Interactive connection to our database comes to mind!

We’re ready when you are Rick!

Finally Edco experienced the most important feature you never want to use – support when the phone system has gone down.  Again, in Rick’s words:

As for emergency response, well we couldn’t ask for more.  Recently when our server crashed three times, Facet came to the rescue, not only did they have a recent back-up of our system’s configuration, they spent the time (many hours) with me and our IT director to get the system back up and running.  Some of this actually took place over a Saturday and Sunday.  In the interest of time they directed me to buy a server locally after our original one went down 3 times.  A couple of weeks later they were still bugging me for the receipt for the server.  I finally asked why and they told me that it was covered under our maintenance agreement.  By this time I had realized that we were causing the server to crash and told Facet that I could not accept their money for this new server we really didn’t need.  So with their help, we took the old server and the new server and hooked them up in a way that if one fails, the other one can pick up where the old one left off.You ask whether I am happy with FacetCorp, Facetphone and their staff, the answer is a very affirmative YES!

FacetCorp has provided Edco’s business communication needs since 2010.  We look forward to continuing this role for many more years to come — and we can’t wait to implement Rick’s next cool idea!