My name is Scott Neighbors and I am the Executive Pastor with First Baptist Church in Skiatook. I've been in that position for 17 years. I'm a hometown boy that came back home and watched our town grow a lot. And with it, our church is growing and with that, their IT needs. And that's what brought us to JD Young.
I have known the JD Young corporation for over 25 years. It goes back to my previous church where they were my copier company. When I came here, I brought them with me. At the very beginning, we knew that we had a phone problem because even though we already had JD Young phones, they were the old, old models. They had gotten outdated. They need to be replaced. And so we were asking about what we could do to upgrade.
When we wore those phones out literally and we started looking for new phones, we found out that the technology had changed tremendously and that our support—mainly our internet service—was not strong enough to support anything that we would want to do other than just basic internet service and keep the same old POTS lines we had with the old phone service.
So, we searched for quite a while. We searched for probably almost a year and a half, two years trying to get a solution with the other multinational and national companies. When we got ready to get started going to work with the big multinationals, Don and that group came to walk through it with us. They helped talk us through it. They helped us interpret what they were saying because we were really dealing with people overseas, literally.
So, when we finally got that process done, we got the new internet in and we started then talking about getting our phones upgraded, I said our biggest problem right now is computer support. Because when you say "IT," most people think it means "information technology." We think it means "you're it" and I was always the "it" guy that had to go do it and I wasn't really trained to do that.
We had a set of phones here. We had a set of phones there. We had internet here. We had internet there. And we've always wanted to hook the two together, but there was never a good way to do that. But Don suggested that a line-of-sight satellites would work. And again, Rick came out looked at it and said "yeah, I think this will work" and so we were able to install that. So, the nice thing about it is now is that our internet at both campuses is the same internet. Our phone system, our phone numbers, are the same numbers. But when it all started working, when it all started falling into place would be when we realized that the two buildings were talking to each other. And I think the day we went from, from you know, barely getting six megs of download and upload to getting 50, everybody in the congregation loved it.
The thing I liked the most about JD Young was that Rick and all those guys, they worked around us. I mean they worked late evenings to get around to our office hours to keep us from being down during office hours. So, getting on board with all the new tech and everything, I think was as good as it could be. The phone system really is much better. We love what we've got. It allows us to do some other things in terms of being about to forward calls and get them to our cell phones. And all of that was good, but I think the selling point for us was when Don showed us how that ties into everything else we do. And how some of these other problems that we had, that we had never even related to phones, could suddenly be addressed with the phone issue.
Internally, in the office, the biggest changes we've seen is that my load has gotten a lot lighter because now I think it's given our secretaries and office personnel the confidence that they have somebody to go to that will answer the phone, and it won't be, "I'll send a man out in four days," you know, sometime between eight and five, that kind of thing. We're going to get somebody out there pretty quickly. They're going to come and take care of our problems.
JD Young offers a huge amount of training and it's all part of the package. They'll train you on how to do all the bells and whistles on your system. If you just want somebody to do a job, a lot of people out there can do it. But if you want somebody to build a relationship with, somebody you can call on, somebody can call with the unique situations that came up, I think I would recommend JD Young for that. If you really want somebody to personalize their services for you.
Learn more about VoIP & Telecom Systems from JD Young Technologies in Tulsa, OK.
