Case Study: Broadview Supplies Flexible, Cost-Conscious Communication Solution for Nonprofit Interact

The Company

Broadview Networks
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/broadview-networks
Twitter: @1800broadview

Broadview Networks is a network-based business communications provider serving customers with local and long-distance voice and data communications, premises-based and patented hosted VoIP systems, data services and a full suite of managed and professional services. It also provides an innovative portfolio of bundled, hosted IP phone and cloud computing services designed to meet the unique application requirements of diverse workforce groups. Its customers benefit from award-winning customer service, including a Web-based account management tool and a primary point-of-contact for real-time, personal customer care.

The Client

Intercommunity Action Inc. (Interact) is a nonprofit health care organization that provides services to older adults, support for people with intellectual and development disabilities, and counseling for children, adults and families. Interact operates more than two dozen individual programs and has more than 400 staff members who work from five different locations throughout the greater Philadelphia area to fulfill their mission and meet the needs of the community.

The Challenge

Interact needed to find a cost-effective communication solution with flexibility that would enable staff to be more accessible to their clients and work seamlessly among their five locations.{ad}

Interact staff members frequently rotate and work from various sites which made it difficult for clients to reach the right employee. The organization often received complaints that clients would search for the phone number for each location and expect to speak directly to the appropriate person when they called, but the staff member was typically working from a different location, with a different phone number. Staff struggled with missing calls, and in the behavioral health sector, it is very important that clients’ calls are always received.

“The key driver for looking for a new phone system was the need to unify all my sites under one system to make it easier for someone calling to get to the right person,” said Mike Mann, Interact’s vice president of IT services. The organization also struggled with maintaining its five individual premises-based phone systems at each location; instead of upgrading each one, Mann wanted to find one solution that would unify all of their locations to make internal and external communications easier. In addition to the technology challenges, Interact utilizes numerous contract employees who rotate locations and work varied hours, so Interact wanted a flexible solution that would allow workers to share desk spaces and access their individual voicemails from any phone at any of their locations.

And, as a nonprofit organization with a very restricted budget, Interact needed …

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… a new communication solution that was budget conscious.  

The Solution

Broadview Network’s award-winning, cloud-based communications system, OfficeSuite Phone solved Interact’s challenge of seamless client communications by centralizing its call management. “We are able to be more efficient by having one central receptionist through the Digital Receptionist feature so the calls are all transferred and received properly,” says Mann. “It is much easier for our clients to get in touch with the appropriate staff member now.”

In addition to replacing Interact’s five different phone systems, OfficeSuite unified the organization’s communications and provided them with the flexible features they needed, including extension-to-extension dialing, hot desking and personalized voicemail accessible from any site location. The ease of use has freed Mann from time-consuming administrative tasks. “It offloads administrative tasks for me,” he states. “In the former system, I would have to set up and change individual voice mails for our staff, but now they can manage it on their own. We love how the voicemail functions; it is straightforward and powerful.”

As well as the new functionality and features, OfficeSuite provided Interact with the budget-conscious pricing they needed. According to Mann, it cost 30 percent less than other hosted solutions they looked at.

The Results

Mann says OfficeSuite has given Interact the flexibility it needs to operate more efficiently and focus on its mission of providing exemplary behavioral health care to its clients. He reports that the CEO recently told him about a new client who needed the organization’s services and was not sure who to ask for, but thanks to their new unified communication solution, was able to reach the right person the first time. “This was definitive proof that full interconnectivity of sites that OfficeSuite gave us is working,” he says.

OfficeSuite’s centralized website enables Mann, the only IT support for the entire organization, to control the system for all five locations, which allows him to focus his time on growing the organization instead of spending time on general support duties. In addition, the organization now has predictable costs so it is far easier to set its budget accordingly.  “Every dime we don’t spend on something else, such as communication solutions, we get to spend on delivering services to those who need them,” says Mann.

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