Before the company made the decision to upgrade to a modern, cloud communications solution, CCS was becoming increasingly frustrated trying to keep its outdated phone infrastructure viable. As Director of IT Kevin Chow explains, “I was managing 300 servers to support 120 employees, and every phone on every desk was at least 8 years old. It was a total mess.”
But as a non-profit, CCS had to be mindful of its operating budget. Although the company charges a nominal fee for some of its debt management services, CCS relies on the credit granting community for more than 70% of its funding. Because the organization wanted to allocate as much of its budget as possible to its most important functions—serving consumers—CCS hung onto its legacy phone infrastructure as long as possible.
Eventually, though, the problems with the phone system itself began affecting the company’s ability to serve consumers.
Nor was this the phone system’s only problem. As Kevin explains, the system was so complicated and non-intuitive that it would take the team days to make even small configuration changes, such as updating routing instructions.
“Every command and feature of that system was buried in menus or submenus,” Kevin recalls. “When we couldn’t figure out how to make a certain administrative change, or if we worried that trying to do it ourselves would break something, we’d have to bring in a third-party support company that charged us an exorbitant hourly rate.”
And there was yet another challenge. CCS wanted to consolidate its communications applications into a single platform and have the ability to integrate workflow apps as the company rolled them out. But its on-prem phone system offered only limited team messaging functionality, no video conferencing capability, and no ability to integrate productivity apps.