The Scenario: No UCC

Several months ago, we received a call, rather distraught. The company was familiar with unified communications and collaboration (UCC), in fact, they couldn’t live without it…they were attempting to switch providers and their service had been down for several days.

WhitepaperImageThe phones were forwarded to cell phones so they were still receiving customer calls, but this honestly was not what was bothering them most. While forwarding the phone accounts for the voice service, the company was near paralyzed without the rest of their UCC capabilities, collaboration in particular, and the issue went on for nearly a week before they decided they needed to go somewhere else. Welcome to OCN we say!

We won’t discuss service providers or carriers, but let’s take a look at the rest of the scenario. With permission, we are sharing this customer’s story with you because there is no better way to demonstrate the value of UCC than with a real life business.

This company had 15 employees. Six to eight worked out of the HQ office location on any given day, while the rest worked from home offices in various parts of the country; all also had mobile apps tied to their business line, ensuring they did not miss calls and their business identify remained current (individual cell numbers private). This team’s daily routine included a connection with other employees through their UCC app. All day, every day, they were all connected on their computers and/or mobile devices. Presence and chat are the way they all feel a part of the same team, and collaborate together to get their jobs done. When the need arose, they could easily jump onto a video call, share their desktop, and quickly resolve an issue or plan the next marketing campaign. This capability was down and productivity came to a screeching halt.

What’s Missing

With voice service forwarded to cells, they were receiving all their calls. This enabled their outage to be seamless to their customer from that perspective, but let’s look at what was missing.

  • Ability to place calls from their business identity, such as returning customer inquiries or making sales calls. Now to make outbound calls, they would have to reveal their individual cell phone numbers or block caller ID. Neither scenario is a good one—revealing the cell phone number might be an issue for the individual, however for the company, it risks losing business intelligence. It might also serve to confuse the customer going forward if they are unsure what number to call, or simply don’t even notice and callback to the number that called them. For a company that lives and breathes UC, this is a problem. Blocking caller ID could be a temporary solution, but many people do not answer blocked ID calls, which would mean the company was out of touch with their customers.
  • Collaboration! This company is highly collaborative. They are an entrepreneurial environment, employ numerous millennials, and are very used to having technology at their fingertips, enabling them to be connected all the time. They seamlessly share information and work together, get quick answers to questions, second opinions, and genuinely work online as if their colleagues are sitting at a desk next to them…and this capability was zapped away literally overnight. Other than email, for most team members, this is the only way they can communicate. It’s so embedded in their worklife, they didn’t even have colleague’s cell numbers in some cases.
  • Web meetings. Whether internal or customer presentations, the ability to meet with team members or conduct new business with their web meeting room was also gone. The company leverages their fully inclusive UCC solution so did not have subscriptions to GoTo Meeting, WebEx or other such services.

The company acknowledges the loss of the ability to collaborate as their most devastating loss. While the rest was certainly inconvenient, they could work around it. Collaboration however defined their entire work process. Without it productivity ground to a halt and the company lost much momentum and work product for the better part of a week. This is when they came to OCN.

The Solution: UCC Returns

“With their all inclusive UCC offering, and local approach to onsite deployment, OneCloud Networks was a quick and easy choice,” said their CEO. OneCloud Networks quickly created the customer and users within the BroadCloud environment. We deployed temporary numbers behind the scenes and forwarded the customer’s lines to these temporary numbers. Customer team members could download the mobile app from the portal and were immediately up and running with all the UCC features they were so dependent upon. A slight learning curve, but given the customer’s familiarity with UCC and through OCN’s onsite deployment resources plus online orientation for the remote team members, it was very quick for their team members to familiarize themselves and become productive. “That was our most critical focus: to restore productivity to the team,” said Haider Mirjat, OCN’s Chief Solutions Officer.

“OCN had us up and running, fully operational within a day. We wish we went there first,” said their CEO.