Growing a Company by Acquisition Can Create a Phone System Nightmare. How Do You Solve It?
Our Client
Headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota, the $3.3 billion medical device company employs approximately 12,000 people worldwide, with products sold in more than 100 countries.
They specialize in medical device technology and services for cardiac, neurological, and chronic pain patients worldwide.
Our Client’s Dilemma
In a business where there are several competitors offering similar products, quite often, whoever picks up the phone first gets the sale. And yet our client had no way for sales people and executives to communicate between offices, facilities or call centers.
Each facility, often acquired through mergers and acquisitions, had a legacy PBX system, many dating from the 70’s. Each facility was independent and had its own phone number. It was difficult for executives to travel to, and operate from, other facilities. The sales force was hindered because there was no call routing or forwarding and every office or facility required a different phone number. Phone messages could be on slips of paper at any number of facilities.
In fact, it reached a point that sales people were giving their personal cell phone numbers to clients because it was the only way they could get direct calls. However, because of that, if the sales person left the company, they could potentially take the client with them.
What Our Client Wanted
As a company growing by mergers and acquisitions, they wanted to be a united company.. One look, one feel, one phone number and one voice for all clients and customers. They wanted central control and management of client contact and information. And they wanted communication convenience for both sales personnel and company executives.
Midwave’s Rapid Response Solution
Midwave won the job for two reasons:
- Our ability to understand what the client wanted to accomplish
- Our flexibility to execute the solution
While Midwave offered a flexible support model, their competitors expected the client to adapt to the consultants' proprietary “one size fits all” system.
Midwave developed a single Cisco platform to integrate all the client's systems globally. The system integrated their existing voicemail and legacy PBX systems regardless of whether they were Nortel, NEC or Octel systems. Midwave also helped set up call centers in Austin, Texas with 200 new phones and Minnetonka, Minnesota with 150 phones. And they set up a Service Desk/Phone Center locally, with 15 analysts.
Results
The definition of mobility for the client was the ability of their sales force and executives to be responsive to customers and potential customers anywhere at any time. Midwave successfully brought this into existence for them. Midwave also gave them the ability to maintain their company-wide telephony system while individually updating various centers as time and budget allowed.
But perhaps the greatest benefit to the client, a company that grows by mergers and acquisitions, was the creation of a “playbook” or format for conversion. They now have a plan they can give to any company they acquire and say, ‘follow this method and you’ll be integrated with our system quickly and efficiently.’
And the same methodology Midwave developed to integrate the client's phone systems can now be used to integrate all their IT services as well. These efficiencies will make mergers much more cost effective. Eventually, this will translate into huge time, cost and complexity savings as the client's company continues to grow.