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PanTerra Success Story: WaveStrong, Inc.
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Simplifying Global Communications and Collaboration with WorldSmart.
“We have been working with PanTerra Networks for years. I found PanTerra has the only solution in the market today that unifies all communications and collaboration applications at both personal and organizational levels, enabling us to communicate most effectively on a global scale. PanTerra provides us excellent support and their quality of service is superior. Most importantly, the WorldSmart solution has saved us a lot of time and money.”
Background
WaveStrong, Inc. was founded in 2001 to provide strategy and solution consulting services to information technology organizations. With clients around the globe, the company consults with CIOs, CTOs and CISOs from mega companies like Kaiser Permanente and DirectTV to small and medium sized businesses. Their vertical markets include health care, financial services, life sciences and legal. Clients include community hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, credit companies, law firms, regional airlines, state and county government, and retailers.
Challenge
As a client centered consulting firm, WaveStrong requires reliable and robust communications with frequent and flexible collaboration between staff and clients. To have a unified system for communications and collaboration with clients, vendors, and staff is critical to their daily business. Most of their consultants work at client sites on a regular basis. When they were at client sites, the company was losing visibility to them and their work. Management felt that responsiveness to clients was slowing down and timely discussions across many boundaries were becoming very difficult because information sharing across consulting teams was a big challenge without a communications and collaboration solution to allow instant cross-team communications from remote locations.
"Before using WorldSmart, if we wanted to have a sales meeting, we had to travel to the client’s site or had to have both clients and our consultants travel to meet together at our office. This meant we would lose billable consulting hours on current work engagements to meet with future prospects. Without advanced audio conferencing and enhanced web conferencing capabilities, we could only justify a few face-to-face sales meetings per month as our travel costs and lost billable time was substantial.”
WaveStrong uses an executive office setting to host the consulting business. In the past, desk phones were provided by the landlord. The phones were old and clumsy, and the charge was over $200 per month per phone. When travelling internationally, communications with office staff and their families were largely dependent on hotel phone systems or mobile services. The consultant travel expenses soared, which translated into skyrocketing costs and lower service margins.
Solution
The legacy business telecommunications services and office premise platform at WaveStrong did not work well enough for their consulting business. A trial of WorldSmart full spectrum communications services was offered to support daily business, including digital voice services, soft-phone, collaboration, conferencing, IM and inbound ACD. After a successful one month system trial, the switch was made permanent, and significant cost savings were achieved in the second month.
PanTerra set up the WorldSmart corporate telephony system using on-demand service with automatic call distribution and call routing trees to the managers and consultants. The old phones provided by the landlord were removed, saving over $600 per month. That immediate cost saving allowed WaveStrong to rent more office space. They were soon able to completely drop the other eFax and web conferencing services and saved even more. The WorldSmart on-demand platform with WorldSmart Fax and enhanced web conferencing services became their global communications and collaboration solution.
“WorldSmart is the best solution for a professional services company like ours. For us, the global communications service is a perfect fit. Our consultants can be anywhere, make and receive calls with anyone in the world, and not lose touch with customers, vendors, team members, and family. WorldSmart allows our team members to stay connected to our corporate telecommunication platform and have only one voicemail box to manage. Our systems staff has only one communications platform to administer, and our company only has one phone bill to pay.”
With the typical limitations of on-premise based systems, it is hard for small and medium businesses to survive in the global economy. Users are locked into phone numbers from the services provider, call distribution routings are inflexible, and there are multiple voicemail boxes to manage. Cost per phone line charged by the landlord can greatly exceed the value received.
WaveStrong found that the PanTerra Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution was a perfect fit. WorldSmart made it possible to achieve total flexibility when on a client site, working from home, or even packing up and moving offices to a new location. Worries about missing phone calls or business interruptions disappear while mobility is increased.
“The increased mobility that WorldSmart enables is a big plus for us. We now encourage our international consultants to use the soft-phone as a perk to stay connected with their families and have peace of mind when they are at work,” Mr. Sholer explains. “One of our consultants spends weeks at a time in Spain each year. He is now able to work remotely supporting his customer with WorldSmart and still attend all meetings and book his customary billable hours. Another thing worth mentioning is that the call quality is like next door neighbor calling each time, even on international calls from around the world.”
When WaveStrong’s toll free number is called, an automated IVR greeting is played, and the call is then routed to work queues for pick-up by the next person available. Employees can receive calls on WorldSmart soft-phones integrated with the IM client on their computers, or route calls to any other numbers they want. In most cases, consultants prefer to have their calls directed to mobile phones when away from their computer attending meetings. So the entire company now has the flexibility to receive direct or toll free calls from anyone to anyone, anywhere, at any time.
"WorldSmart™ services have saved us time and money, and helped us remain competitive in the global market. The feature we are most excited about is the enhanced web conferencing. Having web conferencing capabilities fully integrated with other applications allow us to host webinars, reduce our sales travel, and increase our training capabilities. In addition, the WorldSmart IM allows our employees and partners stay visible to each other with presence status. It also enables Yahoo, AOL and MSN Messenger federated within a single IM client to stay connected with anyone throughout the work day and into the evening. We can see when they are online available to chat or on the phone, which enhanced our communications and business relationships in a much broader way.”
Key Results and Benefits
- Seamless integration bringing all communications and collaboration applications together through a user-friendly unified interface.
- Flexibility in setting up call routing plans to never miss a single client call.
- Simplified and streamlined internal communications via instant messaging to share knowledge and information across the company.
- Visibility of remote workforce with presence status, and staying in touch with team or family members from other parts of the world.
- Increased mobility in reaching the most available and appropriate consultant.
- Unparalleled voice quality and superior customer support facilitating global business activities.
- Increased productivity of “virtual” office workforce with lower operational expenses.
- On-demand service with no hardware or software investments to scale up or down.
About WaveStrong, Inc.
WaveStrong is a California-based professional services firm providing information security consulting services to IT organizations on large, complex, and mission critical projects, such as corporate merger integration, compliance audit, and IT infrastructure optimization. The company provides risk management plans, vulnerability assessments, security solution designs, product evaluators, systems integration engineers, program planners and project managers.
About PanTerra Networks
PanTerra Networks, Inc. is a leading provider of on-demand unified communications with its WorldSmart™ software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution. The company is privately held with its headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, and Research and Development located in Hyderabad, India. For more information, please visit www.panterranetworks.com or call +1 408.702.2200.