As benefits consulting firm grows, IP-based phones make sense.
When network administrator Matt Chiardonna began building a VoIP system for CCA Strategies’ customer-facing call center three years ago, he quickly saw the technology would be beneficial for the internal phone system as well.
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The company, a collection of business units dealing with different facets of benefits consulting, is growing 10%to 20% per year with sites springing up across the country. Already, CCA boasts more than 200 employees at 10 sites in cities such as Atlanta, Chicago, Denver and Los Angeles. Employees work out of small offices, home offices and from the road.
Chiardonna says the growth was putting a significant strain on the company’s PBX system. Add to this that three years ago, the firm began hosting a call center to answer benefits participant calls. “We needed a system that could record, log and report on calls,” he says. “Could our phone system support all this? The answer was not really.”
Chiardonna turned to a software-based package from Interactive Intelligence that runs off Windows 2000 Server. Though that solved his call-center problem, he was still stuck on the capacity limitations of the internal phone system.
“I thought, with our continued growth rate – we have four offices opening next year – do we keep putting stress on the current PBX or go in a different direction?” he says.
Chiardonna also faced the problem of not having IT staff in each location, so working with local phone companies to get up and running would have been difficult. “We have actuaries that play the dual role of IT person at each site,” he says.
He decided to build out what he was using for the call center to the entire company. The first step was to create an MPLS network. “MPLS helped us mesh all the offices together,” he says. With the help of technology retailer and consultancy CDW, he began deploying Polycom phones at each site.
“This is completely software-based. There is no hardware so there is no physical environment. We can have our phone system anywhere we want within our MPLS network,” he says. He adds that the MPLS network also allows for redundancy and failover.
Rolling out the phones has been a learning experience. “We honed our strategy so that for each deployment, we walk into an office, count the number of users, buy phones, buy a switch to support those phones and have everything ready to go within two weeks,” he says.
Users who travel between offices are excited about the new system and are eager for it to be in every office. “Traveling users can go office to office and still have their phone system. The system also shows availability of consultants who are always in meetings. And there is no cost for calls between offices,” he says.
CCA also uses the system to send and receive faxes. “Before, if someone sent a fax after-hours from Los Angeles to Chicago, it would be missed. Now all faxes are being sent straight into Outlook using the voice over IP network,” he says.
The next phase of the rollout will focus on creating a centralized receptionist pool so that each office does not have to employ a person to answer phones. “Two or three receptionists across the country could answer calls, and if one person is out, calls could be rerouted to another office. In terms of staffing, voice over IP represents immediate savings,” he says.
Chiardonna has saved more than $100,000 by not having to deploy new hardware and voice mail servers or pay for phone service and support at each site. He says he’s looking forward to adding new features to the network. “We’ve been using voice over IP for seven months, and we’ve only scratched the surface of what it can do,” he says.
