A large technology-oriented media firm consolidated several offices into a single West Coast location. The initial deployment has now expanded to include six other locations across the country, as well as a London office.
The company has a small telecom staff and required a simple, efficient management system, as well as a plug-and-play capability that would enable the company to add, move, change, activate, or deactivate telecom services and users.
Many company employees travel extensively or work from home. These employees use VoIP’s soft phone capability, which provides them with seamless work environments. Phone calls thus follow employees wherever they go, regardless whether they travel between offices, work from home, or use their cell phones. This feature has increased staff productivity companywide and has led to particularly high increases in the productivity of company salespeople.
Call operators throughout the organization use VoIP call management functionality to determine which staff are on the phone, in meetings, and out of the office. In transferring an employee’s calls, operators obtain real-time information about the employee’s status and know instantly where to send the call.
Furthermore, the auto-attendant function uses menu-driven options to address billing and other customer care issues in a friendly and efficient manner.
Today, the company can easily add, move, change, activate, or deactivate telecom services and users. Moreover, the company frequently uses conferencing services, and fully integrated VoIP conferencing capabilities can deliver scheduled audio conferences as well as web collaboration and data sharing sessions.
On infrequent occasions, the system has experienced short-term problems in a single location; however, due to the distributed architecture, other locations have seamlessly picked up the operation, thus eliminating downtime. Built-in failover functions and the absence of a single point of failure have resulted in an extremely reliable operation.
The VoIP implementation saved nearly $100,000 in cabling expenses in the new building. The company began realizing an ROI from day one, and additional cost savings continue to accrue as a result of dramatically reduced long-distance and conferencing expenses. Conferencing expenses alone have been reduced from $16,000 a month to between $2,000-$3,000 a month, while the number of conferencing minutes has increased by nearly 60%.
