Buying the right VoIP equipment isn't enough. It takes proper planning, installation and staff training to complete the picture.
Sacramento-based BloodSource, one of the premier blood centers and transfusion medicine support organizations in the world, spent two years struggling with a VoIP system that had not been set up properly.
Though not the original vendor, SOS was able to come in and correct the problems in a matter of weeks.
Challenge
BloodSource, founded in 1948 as the Sacramento Medical Foundation, has grown to a network of 15 blood centers throughout Northern and Central California. It needed a phone system that matched its mission.
Its choice was a Cisco-based system, including Cisco CallManager, Cisco Unity unified messaging and Cisco IPCC Express, a contact center application. But even though BloodSource had chosen top-name equipment from a well-known vendor, from the start there were performance problems.
"It was functioning, but it wasn't functioning in the manner we were told it would function and we thought it should be functioning," said Cindy Enloe, network and communications administrator for BloodSource.
Callers couldn't look up the extension of an employee after business hours. There were problems with 9-1-1 dialing capabilities. One of the strong selling points of IP telephony — call routing to eliminate long-distance charges between more than a dozen BloodSource locations — hadn't been implemented. BloodSource had identified a list of issues that needed to be cleaned up and changes that needed to be implemented.
"Things that should have been resolved at the time of installation were not resolved," said Enloe. And when features were added or changed, new problems cropped up. "The list was endless," Enloe said.
None of this involved SOS, but SOS did have a relationship with BloodSource for a few other services. Thus word got back to SOS that BloodSource was disenchanted with its system. On top of that, Enloe had to go out on leave for a while and the in-house network engineer had left BloodSource.
"We are partners, and we have been for more than a decade,” said Gia McNutt, Chief Executive Officer of SOS. "We went and talked to them and made them understand that we had those services to bring to bear. They started working with us with renewed vigor in other areas. They saw how much knowledge we brought to the party."
"They asked if we could put someone on site for 30 to 60 days. We carefully chose a resource who we thought would have the right skills and be a good fit as well."
McNutt sent over Santosh More, a convergence engineer, to help straighten things out.
Solution
"They brought me in to analyze their system and give feedback about what needed to be fixed," said More. "They wanted me to determine what was most critical."
More confirmed that BloodSource had been spending thousands of dollars a month in long-distance charges because the organization was not making use of its Voice over IP infrastructure. He routed the calls through the local gateways at each site, and now someone dialing from, say, Sacramento to Redding is charged only for a local call.
He activated features that had been dormant, got the caller ID to display properly and fixed the priority one items on the BloodSource list of issues.
One of his biggest discoveries was that the disaster recovery process for the system had not been designed properly.
"That's a key aspect of any application," More said. "We made sure BloodSource had the right backup and fail-over server. Their phones will always be up." And even when the equipment was working properly, More discovered that BloodSource staff had not received adequate training on it. "We upgraded the servers to the right version and gave one-on-one training," said More.
The results
"It's a great improvement," said Barbara Hearod, coordinator for the reception area at BloodSource.
"It was a great pleasure working with SOS and Santosh. We've had this phone system for over 2 years and since SOS has been working with us, I finally know how to use it."
