#cloud case study

Business Problem

Concierge Communications helps companies identify the best, most-cost effective communication services to suit their business requirements. With a sales force of 14 full time people, 95 independent sales agents who were distributed all over the country and a new company acquisition, their business was growing at a pace that was beyond their in-house systems.

Concierge had sales materials located in dozens of internal servers and provider websites. Due to this lack of centralised material, the sales support team was finding it increasingly difficult to manually filter through documents from dozens of vendors to find a match for each customer’s needs quickly.

Cloud Solution

As Concierge was already familiar with existing Microsoft programs, they chose to explore Microsoft Online Services, accessed through a monthly subscription via the cloud. This included a range of software which is now available in Microsoft Office 365, including: Exchange Online for messaging, SharePoint Online for collaboration, web conferencing facilities as well as instant messaging. “The centralized email, calendar-sharing, and collaboration sites would give us a way to make our sprawling employee base a tight, cohesive team again” says Clark Atwood, Vice President of Concierge Communications.

Office Manager, Stefanie Long, despite little formal IT training, drove the deployment. She was able to control the amount of access employees had, with 22 full licenses and 20 licenses that provide read-only access and smaller mailboxes than the others (known as Kiosk workers in Office 365). Long also built an intranet and sales portal by using SharePoint Online which enabled employees to access resources. “This software is easy enough to use that our staff has internally developed and maintained new features on its own, and will continue to do so in the future. We know that if we want to do something more sophisticated than our people can handle, Microsoft has a value-added reseller channel with companies like Strategic SaaS (Software as a Service) that we can turn to for help.” Says Atwood.

Direct Benefits

· Rapid deployment- migration to a new email system took only an hour.

· Ease of administration- the new portals made it easy to organise and search through large amounts of data. Also Concierge is able to set expiry dates for documents to keep data more relevant.

· Concierge was able to streamline the sales process and experienced a reduction in emails/phone calls.

· They were able to reduce the need for additional sales-support staff despite increasing the size of their sales force by 3 full-time sales people and 12 new independent agents. Cost avoidance of about $50,000 (U.S.) a year.

· With sales-support time being much faster, Concierge was able to have the competitive advantage

· Employees were able to set meetings with independent agents and schedule conference rooms

· Concierge experienced a Reduction in spam since using Microsoft Forefront Online Protection.