Simplicity VoIP Solves Work-From-Home Challenge
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact the country, businesses have dealt with an unprecedented operational shift as they send employees and students home to work and learn. Flexible communications and cloud applications have helped companies make the transition and weather the economic storm – as demonstrated in the case of a vocational education group we recently helped.
The Aviation Institute of Maintenance, Centura College and Tidewater Tech are the schools that make up one of the largest vocational entities in the country. Together, the schools are focused on adult education in a range of skilled trade areas, including advanced aircraft maintenance, automotive, building maintenance and repair, HVAC, health-tech services and more. They have 20 locations across the country, and more than 300 employees working in campus-staff roles. They also have 170 admissions personnel, tasked with making outbound calls and prospecting for new students.
When the stay-at-home orders began going out across the country and businesses embarked on this massive shift to remote working, the consortium was wrapping up a powerful digital transformation with Simplicity VoIP at its heart. It had consolidated manual processes (including pen and paper!) and around 30 different siloed tools used to keep track of its admissions success and student information, into one, flexible and straightforward system.
That system consisted of Simplicity VoIP, a greenfield Salesforce.com implementation and a computer-telephone integration (CTI) platform that tied it all together. Working with CrossPeak (a Salesforce.com integrator), and Tenfold a VAR that provided the CTI, this was rolled out across the group’s many campuses in the first part of the year. The colleges were soon reaping the operational benefits of the new system, especially when it came to the performance of its admissions staff.
Then, the coronavirus hit. But fortunately, because Simplicity VoIP is hosted in the cloud, Aviation Institute of Maintenance, Centura College and Tidewater Tech were able to fairly seamlessly make the pivot to working from home – thus protecting their employees’ health and saving their jobs at the same time.
Chris Vtipil, Project Manager at the colleges, told us that our mobile app – SimplicityGO – was shown in a demo at the group’s January conference. While it wasn’t initially earmarked for use by the colleges’ leadership, it was tapped by staff anyway because it keeps them connected to all of their communications and features no matter where they are. Simplicity accordingly layered on additional training and collateral for the mobile app features.
As the rollout progressed, more and more workers adopted SimplicityGO – and little did the colleges know that it would become a core success story for them as the coronavirus pandemic forced its employees to do their jobs remotely from home.
“The timing for this was perfect because we had it in place before COVID-19 hit,” Vtipil told us. “We stepped up on app training, and Simplicity took the initiative and let our users know that it was a possibility and available. It’s saving us a lot of grief and risk for our older and vulnerable employees – it’s a fantastic product right now for a reason that we didn’t expect.”
For no additional cost, any Simplicity user can work from home via cell phone (and voice over Wi-Fi) and the SimplicityGO app. They can use their own work phone number for inbound calling, and calls can ring to cell phones or a home line. They can access contact lists, check messages, review call history, configure their settings, text and in general efficiently work remotely from their cell phone in the exact same way they would from a desk phone.
But it’s also so much more than that.
For instance, for the colleges, Simplicity performs automatic data capture and reporting on calling activity via the CTI; the system captures relevant data points from a given conversation and packages it into data logs for the leadership team.
The logs show how many inbound and outbound calls a rep has handled, how long a call was, and whether it connected with someone on the other end, among other information. The upshot is that managers can stay on top of admissions agents’ student recruitment efforts, even when they’re working from home. Managers can also listen into calls for call quality, or they can easily be brought in to give information and answer question—despite working form a separate location.
Our work with the Aviation Institute of Maintenance, Centura College and Tidewater Tech has been a big success, thanks to Simplicity’s hosted VoIP, its customizable approach, its customer service organization, its transparent and competitive price point – and, in these unprecedented times, the functionality of the SimplicityGO app.
To read the full case study, please click here.
About Simplicity
Simplicity VoIP, based in Richmond, VA, provides hosted PBX, VoIP and business telephone solutions nationally to small, medium, and enterprise-level businesses for a comprehensive unified communications experience. It’s Class 5 geo-redundant VoIP platform is offered in addition to fax-to-email, phones and equipment, and managed services. Named as Richmond’s 11th fastest growing company by Richmond BizSense in 2018, Simplicity VoIP’s key to success is its on-site service, installation and training supported 24/7/365 by a world-class client services team.
