Success Stories

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.

Telcentric 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 Telcentric 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.

Background

BIOLASE Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: BLTI) is the leading dental laser company that develops, manufactures, and markets lasers and related products that advance the practice of dentistry and medicine world-wide. Their products incorporate patented technologies that provide clinically superior performance with less pain and faster recovery times. With its headquarters in Irvine, CA, and offices in Australia, New Zealand, Germany and Spain, BIOLASE currently has a global installed base of 6,500 customers in over 40 countries. These dentists, oral surgeons, other specialists and clinics require superior technical support in order to provide consistent, comfortable and safe treatment to their patients. BIOLASE field service engineers and the technical support help desk have the critical mission to respond to customer inquiries and resolve their technical issues quickly and accurately.

Challenge

While there are many hardware and software solutions available to help technical support center executives manage call center operations, very few of them address all the key criteria that BIOLASE was looking for – flexibility, affordability, scalability, simplicity and mobility. Since their existing communications service provider could not meet their needs, a new call center solution was necessary to more efficiently route and monitor customer technical queries while providing the best possible customer experience. This need arose because of the increasing popularity of BIOLASE products and services in the domestic market, along with its plans to focus on international markets and strengthening its global organization for stable growth and performance in the future.

The company had a short window to select, customize and implement a call center solution that would handle all the technical support calls from the dentists and clinics using their products. Having looked at some on-premise solutions, BIOLASE did not see the right match to their criteria in terms of feature-set and functionality. The upfront capital investment and maintenance costs were also prohibitively expensive. When BIOLASE evaluated the Telcentric WorkSuite Call Center solution in early 2008, the company found the right fit and was impressed with the flexible capabilities that Telcentric had to offer.

“We had a cumbersome manual process before.” said Mike Moniz, Sr. Networks Administrator. “When our customers had technical issues, they usually would call our headquarters office in Irvine. They would have to leave a message and a field service engineer later get back to them. Normal turnaround to resolve customers’ issues would be from a few days to weeks. Deploying an advanced call center solution that met our criteria was absolutely necessary.”

Solution

BIOLASE found that the Telcentric WorkSuite Call Center had all the features needed to run a call center business, while still maintaining seamless integration with other on-demand applications such as communications and messaging through a unified user experience. This enables agents to collaborate to fix customers’ issues much faster. BIOLASE found that it could provide unparalleled technical support without investing in the complex array of hardware, software and multi-vendor components traditionally required to build a call center. Equally important was the ease of setup for the hosted solution and the web remote control and configuration tools that have the flexibility to make changes easily. Finally, Telcentric’s “pay as you go” model eliminated the upfront costs and better matched the company’s operations.

BIOLASE initially implemented a hosted, interactive, virtual technical support center with 24 customer agents distributed across North America. The WorkSuite Call Center consisted of a wide array of applications that tied together all real-time communications functions - from phone, instant messaging, voicemail, ACD live monitoring, advanced call queuing, call recording, live chat support, real-time activity reporting - all seamlessly integrated. Because the service is completely on-demand, the BIOLASE field service engineers were able to achieve superior performance from their remote offices at any location in any time zone.

Telcentric delivered this robust functionality on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) basis with no requirement for hardware and software capital expenses. So instead of committing $1 million+ upfront to purchase an on-premise system and having to hire additional IT personnel to implement and maintain it, BIOLASE was able to set up and deploy their new call center within days. They were able to immediately establish an efficient and effective support operation, as well as achieve significant cost-savings that will increase over time, while gaining the added value of improved service and higher satisfaction for their growing customer base.

“Telcentric services are very easy to manage. I really like the web-based administration dashboard, which makes remote configuration and control so simple and intuitive.” says Mr. Moniz, “You can get on to the Internet anywhere on the planet to modify your settings, such as hunt groups and call routing plans to accommodate changing business needs. This flexibility has saved us big time. I know how difficult it is with a traditional on-premise system when it comes to change configurations, which usually takes days to weeks, not to mention the labor and costs involved. I can now get changes done in a couple of hours in the office or even in my car with Telcentric - how cool is that?”

“The savings in time, resources, and money we experienced with the WorkSuite Call Center were immediate and dramatic.” Mr. Moniz continues “But equally important improvements, such as the superior responsiveness to our customers that we can provide, and resolving almost all inquiries from our customers in a single call, have also been made possible. Our customer satisfaction has soared with the Telcentric solution.”

The WorkSuite Call Center was also chosen because of the flexibility and scalability of the platform. As a hosted solution, the entire system can be upgraded for higher volumes at a moment’s notice. The unlimited usage plan also allows budgeting call center costs in a more predictable way with no surprises. BIOLASE is now working with Telcentric to expand the call center operation for their global sales team and enhance the existing headquarters office internal communications and collaboration.

“I am completely in favor of the soft-phone integrated with the instant messaging client. It is so simple with great mobility support.” Mr. Moniz continues. “The soft-phone is a full function office phone with multiple lines, transfer, and conference features. You can download the client software to any PC and use it anywhere. This gives us great flexibility especially when our field service engineers are working at their home offices or on the road. I have never seen any other solution that provides such capabilities to mobilize these services.”

Key Results and Benefits

• Improved customer satisfaction with high “one call” resolution of technical support issues.
• Increased productivity with live call monitoring (silent, whisper, barge-in) that allows call center supervisors the ability to more effectively train their virtual agents from anywhere at any time.
• Unparalleled adaptability by remotely controlling and configuring hunt groups and call routing plans at any time to allow calls to be routed to the most available and appropriate agent.
• Simplified and streamlined internal communications via instant messaging to facilitate knowledge and information sharing and achieve faster technical resolutions.
• Enable a "virtual" call center workforce and staffing from multiple remote locations seamlessly and reliably.
• Visibility into call patterns, volumes, client needs and service levels with real-time call center activity reporting.
• Flexible on-demand service with no hardware or software investment, scaling up or down based on demand, and predictable per seat pricing.

About Biolase Technology

BIOLASE Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: BLTI) develops, manufactures and markets lasers and related products that advance the practice of dentistry and medicine. The company’s principal products are dental laser systems that perform a broad range of dental procedures, including cosmetic and complex surgical applications. Headquartered in Irvine, California, the company has sales offices around the world.

Background

M-Factor, Inc. is a leading provider of marketing investment management systems that helps leading consumer marketing organizations maximize their return on investment. M-Factor is a global firm with its headquarters in San Mateo, California and satellite offices in the US and in London, UK. It offers a hosted suite of software applications that allows marketers to continuously plan, track, and optimize marketing investments. International marketing giants like Coca-Cola, General Mills, Wendy’s and McDonald’s have selected M-Factor’s Marketing Investment Management (M3) software and services to analyze data from many sources, facilitate decision-making, and improve their bottom line performance.

Challenge

M-Factor’s highly experienced professional services team offers a wide array of services to help their customers with everything from initial configuration through training and technical support. They work with each customer to resolve technical support issues quickly and efficiently via phone, email and the web with 24/7 support. With its fast growing business in a global market, having instant, reliable, multimedia communications is critical to achieving customer satisfaction in a demanding environment.

M-Factor previously had an obsolete PBX telephone system at their headquarters. Based on old PBX and voicemail technology, the system was not upgradeable and was limited in performance. Its voicemail capabilities could not be easily integrated with other messaging applications such as Outlook. There were serious limitations when adding, moving, and changing lines and remote satellite offices could not access headquarters resources easily.
After evaluating several hosted solutions from large telecom carriers and emerging service providers, M-Factor found that Telcentric’s WorldSmart solution to be the only one that met their needs in terms of flexibility, mobility and accessibility.

“I had followed the telecom industry and I knew that buying on-premise equipment again would be a mistake,” said Jim Wells, IT Director. “I was interested in moving to a hosted environment for voice and data. However, what was absolutely critical was the flexibility to support growth, accessibility to facilitate staffs working remotely with corporate resources, and to collaborate with clients globally, as well as mobility support for those on the go. When we nailed down to two providers that met our requirements from the crowd, we found the other one was three to four times higher priced than Telcentric.”

Solution

M-Factor reviewed many hosted solutions in the market and then conducted a complete trial of Telcentric’s On-Demand Unified Communications service called WorldSmart. It offers multiple integrated services over a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, eliminating all the separate hardware, software, integration, and maintenance costs. WorldSmart delivers business grade services through a multi-carrier communication network without the IT hassles that are inherent in an on-premise based environment.

M-Factor was able to address its business needs with applications such as advanced business voice, audio and web conferencing, web collaboration, inbound and outbound call center services, desktop sharing and remote desktop access, and secure instant messaging (IM), all delivered within a unified user experience. M-Factor initially installed 45 seats, with two-thirds at the company’s headquarters and the rest of them accommodating the US and international remote offices.

“A communication system with worldwide presence provides tremendous benefits to our business,” says Mr. Wells, “The Telcentric solution ensures that our clients and staffs have the ability to always get in touch with each other no matter what time it is or where they are in the world. It would have been fatal in the long run, if our communications fell behind. This is why we have elected to start completely afresh and centralize our communication and collaboration with the Telcentric SaaS datacenter. The platform enables us to make every function available to every user quickly and painlessly without splicing several systems”

WorldSmart combined the best of mobility and IP telephony technology to satisfy M-Factor’s dynamic needs. It offered the most flexible and cost-effective solution while meeting the stringent demands for high quality service. With such a fast growing business, M-Factor needed a communications system to ensure that clients, suppliers and staffs could always stay in touch, regardless of their geographic locations and time zones. Telcentric’s carrier grade datacenter hosts all the features and functionalities for M-Factor’s staff to access as long as there is an Internet connection. Office and remote staffs have complete freedom of movement, as the communications goes with the person and not the phone.

WorldSmart is composed of a flexible combination of WorkSuite modules. Without upfront costs for hardware or software, this solution has the flexibility to turn on any service with the desired feature and capability needed. As M-Factor grows, more features and capabilities can be added without any hassle.

“The best thing I like about Telcentric’s solution is the mobility,” explains Mr. Wells. “At any time, we can move our IP phones to anywhere, such as home or remote offices, and simply plug into the Internet connection to work with our corporate resources and communicate with our clients and colleagues around the world. Or you can just carry our laptop that has the soft-phone integrated with the WorldSmart secure Instant Messaging. The Outlook exchange integration is really cool. Voicemail, fax and emails are automatically delivered to a single unified box, enabling easy access, archiving and playback of messages from anywhere.”

WorldSmart is designed with future-proof technology which can be built up to facilitate M-Factor’s ambitious growth strategy. It is possible to easily install and uninstall changes to support the business growth. Services on the IP phones can be turned up in minutes on a mass scale using Telcentric’s StartUp tool kit. New features are immediately available to everyone once they are updated at the Telcentric datacenter.

“The service makes it much simpler to manage our communications. The communication system gives us a platform with all the features we can think of and we save time all round. All things considered, it helps deliver a sound return on investment,” Mr. Wells continues. “We understand the software industry, which is a very dynamic world and we need to keep pace with this, so flexibility is the key to a successful communications solution. Telcentric’s solution is expandable and enables M-Factor to adapt and meet our ever-evolving needs.”

Key Results and Benefits

• Eliminates on-premise hardware and software, integration, and maintenance costs
• Voice, web collaboration, in-bound and out-bound call center and messaging services
• Increased productivity from seamless communications and effective collaboration
• Flexibility to support office and mobile staff and dynamic growth in size and locations
• Proven reliability and complete redundancy to ensure the highest quality of service
• On demand service with per seat pricing options and lower total cost of ownership

About M-Factor

M-Factor is helping leading consumer marketing organizations improve their marketing ROI with M3 -- a unique system for managing marketing, promotional investments, and product pricing. M3 offers an innovative combination of forward looking analytics, simulation, and optimization that that allows marketers to continuously plan, track, and optimize marketing spending and typically delivers bottom line improvements equivalent to 10%-15% of trade and marketing spending.

Background

Legend Merchant Group, Inc. (Legend) is a dynamic Wall Street based financial services firm, dedicated to responding to the diverse client needs through investment and asset management. Legend is a nationwide firm with offices in New York City, San Francisco and Ft. Lauderdale, Florida with thousands of clients all over the world. Legend needed to implement business communications services for the growing geographical branch offices with exceptional client responsiveness. The solution had to be fast, easy to deploy, simple to use and administer, and flexible and scalable for the future.

Challenge

Legend previously used an on-premise PBX system with communications and collaborations support fragmented across PC Anywhere, GoToMeeting, and other collaboration components, each with its own system requirements and interface.

They found serious limitations that were hampering the company’s growth and geographical expansion. Legend experienced many problems when adding new employees and when moving or changing lines. It was also next to impossible to seamlessly integrate other applications and services within the architecture. Adding more offices seemed to require duplicating the capital investments, as well as continuing maintenance, support and upgrade charges for each component.

Financial services require fast response in the markets with high information accuracy and security. After consulting with their IT group, Legend decided to remove the existing system entirely and implement a totally new communications solution. After evaluating leading communication and collaboration solutions, Legend selected the award-winning On-Demand Unified Communications solution called WorldSmart from Telcentric Networks that is being used successfully in financial services and many other industries.

Solution

WorldSmart eliminates the need for multiple on-premise systems and applications like PBXs, instant messaging servers, video and web conferencing hardware, and collaboration systems. Available service components include voice, web collaboration, in-bound and out-bound call center and messaging services. Delivered in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, all on-premise hardware and software, integration and maintenance costs are eliminated. An enterprise-grade multi-carrier communications network delivers the voice and service quality that businesses demand.

The unique WorldSmart services delivery model satisfied the growth strategy of Legend perfectly. Their suite of services includes business voice, web meeting, audio and web conferencing, desktop sharing, remote desktop access, as well as secure instant messaging application. Legend deployed WorldSmart services in their San Francisco office in late 2006 for their communication and collaboration needs.

“In our industry, we live in our instant messaging (IM),” explains Mr. Unsworth, “and rather critical, we must have the message archive, where we are able to trace the information and records. Many IM clients do not provide meaningful archive. So we used the free consumer IM applications such as AOL, Yahoo and MSN, which normally are not secure. At the same time, we had to use other software clients to run web meetings or web conferences. What’s great about Telcentric’s WorldSmart is the IM client is able to aggregate all their communication and collaboration services and the 3rd party IM services into one experience, and also provide secured file transfer and archive.”
“Even more, the best thing with WorldSmart is the capability to allow desktop sharing directly from the IM client. This has been extremely easy from our part in compare to the traditional way in the case of support needed. I don’t have to follow the technical support over the phone for half an hour and often time people get lost in the technical instructions. I just give the desktop control to the support by a simple click from the IM client.”

Great service and what it means to a business’ bottom line is sometimes hard to quantify, but customers know when they experience it. WorldSmart on-demand unified communications is visual and easy. To make a phone call, it just takes a click using the soft-phone in the IM client application. Staffs can see the presence of their colleagues and clients, enabling fast responses and information inquiries to support intelligent and timely decisions and higher productivity.

With WorldSmart collaboration services, working together has never been easier. Legend is able to conduct web meetings and desktop sharing with clients from all over the world with a few simple clicks. Real-time business information sharing, like business presentations and secure file transfers, is available with their clients around the world, from New York to London, Paris to Shanghai, and Tokyo to Hong Kong. Yet all these enhanced capabilities are easier to administer and far less costly.

“Now we don’t have to handle five different bills and software user manuals.” explains Mr. Unsworth. “Another beauty of WorldSmart services is the on-demand. We never have to pay a nickel on the features or services that we don’t use. We pay as we use and scale up and down as needed. Now I am expanding the WorldSmart services to New York, Ft. Lauderdale, and even remote satellite offices can be supported with nearly 70 seats as we see the significant benefits of the voice and web collaboration services.”

Key Results and Benefits

• Costs cut more than half – With the WorldSmart services, Legend eliminated the upfront equipment costs for business expansion and cut monthly recurring costs to half.
• Reliability and disaster recovery – WorldSmart services are hosted at Telcentric’s world class, carrier grade, data and communications centers that have sophisticated equipment and full redundancy. Data is always secure and can be quickly recovered. In the case of any disaster, communications can be routed via different network connectivity. With the on-premise PBX, Legend was unable to reach to the rest of the world if they lost connectivity.
• Virtual office dream come true – WorldSmart makes the virtual offices possible. Calls can be routed to anywhere on earth that has a high-speed internet connection. Legend employees can be in their virtual office even when they are on the road.
• No more maintenance or upgrades – There is no hardware or technology to maintain on premise, and no more software upgrades to perform. Telcentric now performs all the day-to-day system operation and maintenance for Legend. All the latest technology upgrades are automatically made available from the data centers.
• Performance and productivity increase – Communication and collaboration have been made simple and easy to use. With the added value from on-demand unified communication services, Legend has the tools they need to conduct global business efficiently and effectively, and they can focus on their core business activities and customer satisfaction.

About Legend Merchant Group

Legend Merchant Group, Inc. (Legend) is a diversified investment bank based in New York with offices in San Francisco and Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Legend is a registered FINRA Broker-Dealer; SEC-Registered Investment Advisor; and member of the National Futures Association, NYSE Arca and SIPC.