American Bridge
A common scenario we see with our clients concerning Digital Transformation is how to migrate to the Cloud from a Legacy PBX and disparate collaboration tools.
American Bridge had been using a variety of systems for conference calling, screen sharing, and video conferencing, and the management team saw advantages in streamlining. “We had too many different ways of communicating in the various conferencing rooms,” said Copenhaver. “Our CEO wanted to see standardized conference phones and video systems in each room.” But the biggest pain point was telephony. “Our existing phone system was over 15 years old,” Copenhaver explained. “The provider was out of business and we could no longer obtain service or parts replacements. We wanted to replace it with a collaborative VoIP solution.” With Skype for Business, the firm solved both problems at once.
How We Helped
The hard and soft gains from the project are impressive. “We had estimated an ROI of 30 months considering the time, effort and expenses of maintaining our previous phone system,” said Copenhaver. In addition to hard costs from saving on moving PRIs to SIP and using new devices which function better and have less service calls, soft benefits have been realized. “Productivity has certainly increased with the ease of scheduling audio/video conference calls from within Outlook,” said Copenhaver. “Ad-hoc conference calls are effortless, so employees are communicating with each other more readily.”
The Results
American Bridge can see the results. “User reaction was and continues to be very positive,” said Copenhaver. “Our mobile users really like the ability to switch from their workspace device to their Bluetooth device without call interruption,” Copenhaver said. "This is huge for them when having to leave for the airport while still on an important call.”
