We spoke with Marc Caruso, founder of TechFox, about his experience providing supermarket chain Karns Foods corporate infrastructure, IT security, and data architecture. Over the course of 18 years, Marc and his team have provided highly valuable cost-saving best practices, time efficiencies and essential operational structure for Karns Foods’ growing business. Marc also works with Phone.com as a Channel Partner.
Can you tell us about how the relationship between Phone.com and Karns Foods began?
Karns Foods is a retail supermarket chain in Pennsylvania with 10 locations. As I started developing the corporate infrastructure for the company in 2001, I started looking at their internal communications. Their phone system was relatively decrepit and lacked some of the more advanced features I knew were available that would add value to Karns. I knew about Phone.com’s features and ease of use from a prior company so I reached out and started the information collection process.
What would you say is the biggest value add of working with Phone.com for Karns Foods?
First, Phone.com helped centralize the Karns Foods phone system across the ten supermarket locations. I’m able to manage the phones for each location, easily adding extensions and voicemail boxes as needed. By centralizing their service, I’m able to simplify calls from location-to-location by creating unique extensions. A call to separate locations can be created by simply picking up a phone and dialing the extension.
Secondly, the major savings we experienced by working with Phone.com. We were able to drastically cut expenses by moving off of traditional carrier lines to a cloud-based VoIP system. Also, outbound calls were reduced by creating the centralized phone system of internal calls from location to location. Working with Phone.com reduced phone costs by 50% for Karns Foods, which is a huge saving.
Wow, that’s great! Were there system features or options that Karns Foods rely on?
Yes, Karns relies on Phone.com for their telecom infrastructure both inbound and outbound calls, with close to 0% downtime. One of the key features that the stores use many times a day is the intercom feature to make live store announcements. Earlier this year, I worked with Phone.com’s development team on the ability to have calls parked while a paging system for the store could be used. This was a great addition to the all-ready packed feature set provided to us. Â
Where to next with Karns Foods, TechFox and Phone.com?
For Karns Foods, we are in the process of rolling out a slew of helpful new administration features like call parking, remote assist and whisper.  I’m working with the Phone.com team on product ideas and helping implement across multiple clients for TechFox.
Find out more about Karns Foods at Karnsfoods.com. For information about Marc Caruso’s company, visit TechFox.it. Learn more about Phone.com’s Agent program at Phone.com/agents, email us at [email protected] or call for more information at 800.842.3394.
