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In this case study:
About the Customer
A shoe manufacturer and distributor in Colorado has distinguished themselves by placing comfort first with nontraditional looks. Since 2002, they have delivered shoes to over 90 countries, expanding their warehouses and retail store locations to keep up with growing worldwide consumer demand. In March, as a response to COVID-19, they launched a donation of shoes to healthcare workers across the globe that has now reached close to one million pairs of shoes.
The Challenge
The shoe distributor had been using legacy on-premise phone system equipment to manage their global call center including customer service support lines, wholesale support for retail stores distribution and support for point of sales. The platform was difficult to maintain across their worldwide locations, especially as the company was experiencing an increase in calls, which challenged the aging platform. The legacy equipment support was being outsourced to a third-party vendor as their employees did not have the hands-on experience to support the system themselves.
The company’s reliance on this vulnerable equipment for operational communication posed a major risk for the organization. When components in the hardware failed, it created an outage that was time-consuming to get back up and running. The lack of consistency in this legacy system was also hurting their operational performance. In addition, they did not have system access to make administrative changes, making it harder to assign and retire phone numbers when onboarding and offboarding employees at the call centers.
The Solution
Quisitive conducted a phone system assessment to evaluate their legacy telephone environment. This created a baseline of what was actively in use from the previous system and what needed to be recreated in a new environment. Quisitive proposed a solution leveraging Teams Voice, a tool the company already owned but were not using. In order to provide quicker execution, Quisitive duplicated their legacy workloads in their Teams environment, rather than revamping their processes. Teams Voice provided stability, lower maintenance and overhead costs and continuous patch updates to provide future improvements.
Quisitive executed a phased deployment plan for locations in North America, Europe, and Asia. Their existing phone numbers were ported to the Microsoft phone system and activated in Teams Voice. In regions where number porting was not available, Quisitive implemented Session Border Controllers and Teams Direct Routing to provide calling services to Teams users through in-country telephone providers.
Quisitive also configured Teams-based auto attendants and call queues to support their US and international customer service and support lines to duplicate previous call center functionality. The use of Teams auto attendants and call queues provided the customer with multiple call flow options to meet their broad needs.
Their regional IT staff was trained by Quisitive to fully support and maintain their new phone system without being dependent on outside assistance.
In addition, Quisitive helped create a global IT support desk to help them expand. Quisitive also developed a plan to launch Teams Voice for more employees in different regions utilizing third-party vendors to coordinate work in various languages across multiple time zones.
The company has improved its remote employees’ access to communication with cloud-based Teams while ensuring security through inherited Microsoft 365 security and compliance.
The Results
Teams Voice provided the global shoe distributor:
- Improved remote work reliability and security with a cloud-based solution
- Consistent performance of business operations
- Reduced time spent on administrative work and ongoing maintenance patches
- Ability to provide service-level agreement (SLA) for call quality and availability
- Centralized technical knowledge for phone system support and maintenance
