Congoleum Corporation (www.congoleum.com) is one of the nation's leading manufacturers of residential and commercial sheet and tile flooring. In addition to their Mercerville, New Jersey headquarters, Congoleum, which was founded in 1886, also has four other facilities in the tri-state region. Their products are available throughout the United States and Canada.

The Business Challenge – A Reduced Staff to Deal with Difficult Carrier Relations
Prior to 2003, Congoleum had a fulltime voice manager, a fulltime voice technician and a 40-hour per week certified Nortel contractor to handle all of their voice system needs. However, in the wake of the economy’s downward spiral, that staff shrank to an on-call Nortel contractor and a voice and data technician who’s on-call five hours each week.

“We used to have all these resources available to us to deal with problems, deal with the headaches, deal with RFPs [Request for Proposals], deal with conversions, and deal with meetings. Now it’s just me and two on-call guys if we need them,” said Dave Cooper, Congoleum’s Manager of End User Systems.

The RFP (Request for Proposals from carriers and vendors for pricing and specifications on services) was one thing in particular that Congoleum and Cooper had always done in-house. However, doing the RFP on their own was starting to present some serious challenges. 

The Second Business Challenge – Knowing What You Want Isn’t Normally a Problem...Right?
When entering the RFP process this time around, Cooper and Congoleum weighed their options and decided to look at dealing with a third-party voice and data provider. The problem was that all of the vendors Congoleum spoke to kept trying to sell them new technologies even though they simply wanted to stick with the same type of service they already had.

An Introduction to ETA
Luckily for Congoleum, Cooper received a call from an independent contractor who introduced him to Paul Weiss, ETA’s Sr. Network Services Specialist. Instead of pitching the latest and greatest technology to Cooper, Weiss carefully evaluated Congoleum’s current state, immediate needs and future wants. After permitting Weiss to create their RFP, Congoleum decided to do their own version of the RFP in order to compare results and ensure that ETA was the right fit.

“After we engaged with ETA to do the RFP for us for our voice and data services, we opted to go out and do a sister RFP,” Cooper said. “Now, the voice world is very small – everyone knows each other – so it was very difficult for me to navigate and produce good faith estimates while ETA was out there as well. I was able to, and what was shocking to me was that ETA’s rates for me were far cheaper than the carrier’s direct sales team rates to me. It wasn’t even close.”

The Solution – A 30% Cost Reduction and a Partnership Forged by Trust
While Cooper got rates that were 10% cheaper, Weiss and ETA secured a 30% reduction in Congoleum’s rates and communicated to the carriers exactly what Congoleum was looking for, resulting in proposals that had the precise format and technology Congoleum was seeking.

“ETA is a vendor that provided a higher level of service and support,” said Cooper. “Since we’ve met ETA, I know I can call the ETA helpdesk, or I can call Paul directly and he’ll pick up the phone, call the carrier and get our problem solved.”

Why ETA – Customer Relationship Excellence
“What this really amounts to when rough hits the road is customer relationship management,” said Cooper. “Where I first noticed that was the project management aspect of the cut over, there’s no question about it. Paul was able to develop a timeline that met our contractual expirations with the previous carriers and provide the cut over for each of our facilities with reasonable dates, at reasonable times, and….he was able to implement suggestions to the old carrier and the new carrier about how they need to cooperate to complete the tasks. That was my first project management rubber meets the road experience with ETA, and that’s when I knew ETA knew what they were doing and we were in a really good place.”

Click here to read the expanded version of Congoleum's ETA story