Bill Haslam – Computer Doctors
Bill Haslam is the owner of Computer Doctors, a company that repairs and manages computer hardware, and has worked with Zelacom for over twenty years. There are two reasons he refers his clients to Zelacom over other companies: their in-depth experience, and the personable customer service.
“They have a deeper knowledge of the workings of the internet, web design, and email than anybody you can find in this county, and probably a lot farther than that,” he said. “I’ve talked to an awful lot of tech people, and I’ve had an awful lot of smoke blown at me. Zelacom is always able to get to the heart of an issue, because they understand how things work on a much deeper level than some Johnny-come-lately to the internet.
“Every kid in his pajamas is a ‘web expert,’ and they treat it like a pinball machine: if you bang on it enough, eventually something will fall into place. At Zelacom they understand the history, why things are put together the way they are, so they’re able to come up with a much more stable solution than just banging things and hoping they work.”
Haslam says he refers clients to Zelacom that need everything from a simple web presence and email address to a robust ecommerce site that integrates inventory, accounting, and fulfillment systems so that both clients and their customers can handle orders with ease.
As for customer service, Haslam says that working with Zelacom is a unique pleasure compared to the typical web-hosting company. “If you have a problem with something, such as your email, with a big company you typically have to submit a ticket,” he explained. “You wait a day a reply, and it’s not always right, and you go back and forth at arm’s length trying to get the problem solved.
“With Zelacom, you give them a call, you talk to a person, and they fix the problem. It’s a very personable experience, whether you need something updated because you don’t have an in-house expert, or there’s an actual problem. A lot of people in customer service are just a little rude, or don’t really have the time to talk to you, but Zelacom is easy to get along with and they talk to you. That’s important to me.”
Bryan Delaney – Irwin Siegel Agency
Zelacom has built several online sites and tools for the Irwin Siegel Agency, says Bryan Delaney, including Pinnacle, an assessment tool for non-profit agencies. “I’ve worked with Zelacom since maybe 1996, and they have worked on a number of projects for us,” he said. In addition to Pinnacle, Zelacom has built or hosted several web sites, as well as the agency’s email server.
Delaney recalled a typical example of the customer service he has come to expect. “We put up a new version of our site, and there was a bug in the coding which brought it down. Someone at Zelacom noticed at 10 o’clock on a Friday night, fixed the problem, and let us know what happened before we were even aware of it. No big corporation is going to even think to check on a site they’re hosting for you like that.”
Jeff L. – Entrepreneur
In the late 1990s, Jeff L. saw a business opportunity in using the internet to match vacant office space in a major city with organizations that needed it. As the project’s scope grew to keep up with demand, Zelacom’s developers built and rebuilt the site multiple times. “It was a never-ending website,” Jeff recalls. “When we started, doing things on the internet was still fairly novel, but over the years you realize you need things like a back end, ways to track leads…” as well as basic ability to gather and use data from the site, he explained.
“One of the things the really impressed me,” Jeff goes on to say, is how Zelacom’s developers “laid out a schematic diagram, showing what happens as someone goes through the site, organizing it as a series of yes/no decisions.” With no tech background, Jeff found himself grateful for a staff that “was very good at taking what I wanted to do, and figuring out a way to make it work. I’m a business guy, and I just wanted it to happen.”
Jeff understood that his ideas were so new that nothing out-of-the-box would work. Zelacom’s solution was nimble enough that they were able to frequently expand and improve it, riding the wave of innovation that was sweeping the industry.
Jillian Medoff – Author
“My relationship with Zelacom goes back to the late ninties,” said Jillian Medoff, a bestselling novelist of literary fiction. “My first novel, Hunger Point, was slated for publication in early 1997, and I was casting around for ideas to help my publisher — HarperCollins — promote it. Although the Internet had been around for a while, it was brand new frontier for me, and I had no idea where to start.”
That’s when Zelacom stepped in to help guide Medoff (patiently and without judgement at what Medoff called her “absolute, painful ignorance” of computers) through the process of building an online presence.
“Sharon Richman designed a website that beautifully reflected the book’s theme, tone, and visual markers. Hunger Point’s narrator has a brash, confessional voice that was rare at the time and left readers wanting to connect with her — and me — which they could do through the site. Few writers were online in those days so I had a unique way to publicize the book and develop an audience.”
Over the years, as Medoff’s subsequent novels were published, Zelacom continued to update her website. “Each of my books has a different feel, which Zelacom captured with every revision. Sharon is so talented and so easy to work with. I suppose I could create my own site, but why would I? Zelacom has been the most professional, patient, competent, and conscientious partner I could ask for. I’m looking forward to many more books — and many more years —working together. I highly recommend them!”
Joann Wasserman – Technical Insurance Services, VIITA, Inc.
Wasserman oversaw the team at TIS that was building EZ Survey Form with Zelacom. “We were growing, and recognized that we needed to gear up for a new way of doing business by putting everything on the internet…
“We had the idea, but none of the technical capabilities. Zelacom and TIS formed a partnership: Zelacom built the platform, and eventually took over full ownership of the system, and we became its first user.
Zelacom had the expertise and the commitment to make the system work. At first, it was just reports, but over time they built an incredible system that handled our accounting, our correspondence . . . everything is now on it. It was state of the art when it was created, and I believe it’s still state of the art today. As they have added other clients, Zelacom has continued to upgrade and improve the system,” by adding additional functionality, she said.
Having wrestled with frustrating software platforms, Wasserman said that the best feature of EZ Survey form is, “It works! The system is almost never down, either from a bug or for maintenance, and when it is, the staff usually makes sure it’s on a weekend. If the system goes down, we’re out of business, so that kind of reliability is critical for us. We’re completely reliant on the system, and we’ve never had any serious problems.”
It’s the lightning-fast customer service which Wasserman believes makes this possible. “They are always available, on the weekend or whenever, and if there’s an issue, they are on top of it. I feel like we still work together as partners.”
Moreover, EZ Survey Form is platform agnostic. “We have independent inspectors all over the country, and they use all kinds of computers and operating systems,” Wasserman explained. “It works in Windows and on Macs, with tablets and PCs and anything else.”
Wasserman said that TIS ultimately didn’t want to lose its focus on loss mitigation, so trusting Zelacom to do the software development made sense. “We recommend the product all the time, at trade shows to our competitors, and through an online inspection school that we manage as another venture,” she said.
John Reggero – Technical Insurance Services, VIITA, Inc.
“I worked closely with Zelacom eight years ago, when we were building the system,” said John Reggero, vice president at TIS. “We were bringing a long-established business online for the first time. We looked at some existing systems, but they didn’t fit our needs, so we decided to build it from the ground up. We were very satisfied with the results. We really have a paperless environment.”
Reggero’s experience working side by side with Zelacom’s programmers has led him to recommend the company multiple times. “The staff is a pleasure to work and collaborate with. They have been constantly available, and they deliver problem-solving results. They respond quickly to problems, and everyone is quite nimble in their thinking. We had the foresight to want to create EZ Survey Form, but Zelacom had the skills to make it happen. They knew their end of the job, and they learned about the insurance business along the way.
“I give them the highest marks for customer service, and I couldn’t recommend them more highly.”
Michael Sullivan – Loss Control Services
Sullivan’s company, Loss Control Services, started adopting EZ Survey Form in 2007-8. “We originally tried to create a solution ourselves using the Microsoft Access database, but it was archaic and cumbersome,” Sullivan said.
“We knew we needed to move to some kind of managed system, and when we started looking for providers, we found Zelacom and EZ Survey Form.”
Customization was a key concern for Sullivan, and he found he could get exactly what he wanted. “I wanted to create my own forms, and the system allowed me to make changes to the different forms and reports. It’s very user-friendly,” he said. “Each vendor has different process flows, and the Zelacom team has a good enough handle on the industry to be able to make the changes we needed. I approach him with an idea, he works it out, and we incorporate it. It works out pretty well.”
Sullivan points to the company’s many contract inspectors as proof of the platform’s success. “I have a lot of part-time inspectors who aren’t in the system every day, but we have very few problems with new consultants coming on board.”
Phil Vallone – RollingV, Roscoe Beer, Creekside Cabins
Phil Vallone is a serial entrepreneur who has used Zelacom for a number of different projects. “We were one of their first clients,” Vallone recalls. “They built the web site for my wife’s business, Creekside Cabins. It was quite a thrill getting the first reservation online, in the early days of web sites!”
In the twenty years since, Zelacom has built a number of sites for Vallone’s ventures, which include Roscoe Beer Company and the Rolling V Transportation Services. Zelacom has also built a number of online tools, including a bus reservation system, an e-commerce site which manages bus passes for New York City students, 350 email accounts, and an effort to help Roscoe win a “trout town” contest.
Of Zelacom’s support, Vallone can’t say enough. “Their people service is phenomenal,” he says. “When we see something we think we want, we ask them about it, and they look to see if it will fit with what we have. They’re responsive, creative, reliable, and very open-minded about trying new things.”
